Five Moments Teddy  Doesn't Get to Have With Henry
by aRegularJo
Summary: And one that she does. Pretty self-explanatory. Chapter five: 2030. The tableau that greets Teddy is frightening but familiar.
1. 2014

So about 100 years ago I actually posted one of the first 'Grey's' fics on this site, and was also a huge fan of Cristina/Burke (I regret that now). I've been bouncing around other shows for a while, but basically left Grey's. Still I watched, and last week I decided to try a "Five Times" style piece. I'm terrible at avoiding fluff, so you've been warned. These are all, obviously, straight out of Teddy's imagination, minus #6. Let me know what you think!

_2014_

Teddy Altman meets Preston Burke at a conference on emergent laser techniques in cardiothoracic surgery. The conference starts Wednesday and she's presenting on Friday and had considered not showing up until then, but Henry thought that was kind of rude and so she decided to attend the whole three days. When she gets to the conference center she sees that Dr. Preston Burke, Emory Medical Center, is presenting on Thursday, and regrets her husband nagging her into doing the right thing (he just wanted the trip to L.A., let's be real). She considers going to his talk ("On the Use of .16 mm Lasers to Repair Ruptured Cardiac Aneurysms") but decides against it, because it would somehow trickle back to Owen and Cristina, and she is On Their Side, obviously.

But she doesn't count on Dr. Price from the University of Chicago pulling her over during the Wednesday night cocktail hour and exclaiming, "Dr. Altman! Have you ever met Dr. Burke? He worked at Seattle Grace as well, though I believe before your time."

She looks at the man and knows he knows she knows who she is. Still she proffers her hand. "No, we haven't met in person. Teddy Altman, chief of cardio."

"Dr. Preston Burke," he says.

"You're in Atlanta now, right?" she attempts to make conversation.

"Yes," he stares at her. He's kind of unnerving. And creepy. And she can see why Cristina, a younger Cristina, would fall for this, but still. Her friend did so much better with Owen. Because this guy, with the frowning, and the seriousness and the imposingness, just does not seem like a very joyful or pleasant person. Not that she's been biased from years of, you know, not liking him on principle. "How is everyone? I heard Chief Webber stepped down a few years ago."

"He did. He's still on staff, though. Owen Hunt is chief now, he's doing really well," she starts.

"Dr. Burke won the Avery with work done when he was at Seattle Grace," Dr. Price interjects helpfully.

"Yes, I actually currently work with his former intern. She worked on several of those cases," Teddy replies.

Burke's face goes ashen, before he barely recovers. "How is Cristina doing these days?"

"She's doing very well. She's finishing up a fellowship with me. A very gifted surgeon."

"I _was_ her first teacher. Though she was always astonishing with the scalpel."

Dr. Price excuses herself to go get them drinks — Teddy just asks for water — and leaves the two of them alone. It's awkward. He's awkward. So is she, really, in this situation, though she knew that already. Finally, she says, "She really is doing exceptionally well. Teaching, even. She's turned into a good teacher, too. With the interns and … others. She's really grown. I wouldn't quite say she's a 'mentor' since that's just a little too touchy-feely for Cristina, but she's doing well." She still didn't know how to feel about Cristina, sometimes, since the things she admired and loved most about Cristina she also considered major flaws (the woman was a surgical machine), but she knew that she deserved an awesome report to this guy. Cristina would want to appear like she had emerged the better.

He nods, inscrutable. Then, "Do you know where she's going after the fellowship?"  
>"She's staying at Seattle Grace," Teddy says. "It's not like she can leave, really."<p>

Burke cocks his head. "Why not?"

"She's married. To Owen. The new chief?" she prompts, before realizing he must not know. How arrogant, really, to follow her career but not her life.

"It's Cristina," he replies. "She's not going to let a piece of paper stop her from taking whatever job suits her interests best. It would be … untrue to her character. A disservice, even."

Her heart breaks for that Cristina he remembers. "Dr. Burke, I know that you and Cristina were close, and Cristina is still probably going to become the top cardiac surgeon in the country in the next ten years, but I assure you, she's not leaving Seattle Grace. She loves her husband. She's not leaving." She looks him directly in the eye for being such a tool, and wished she could be as ballsy as Mark or as waspish as Meredith when it came to these kinds of situations.

There was a pause. "I must admit, I haven't completely kept in touch with the Seattle Grace team. How is everyone else doing?"

She's always gotten the impression — never verbally confirmed — that her friends and colleagues weren't exactly the most adult surgeons when they all first started working together: Meredith and Derek, the married power-couple neurosurgeons with a kid, picked each other up at a bar; Callie was married for about two minutes to the intern that cheated on her then died; Izzie Stevens, the epitome of a hot mess, consumed everyone with her drama. There was something about an LVAD wire that she _knew_ she was better off not knowing anything about. He had been around then, had been part of the Seattle Grace High set. Teddy was grateful she'd come after all that. She was a combat surgeon, and a wife, and she honestly did not have time for all that nonsense. She liked her life exactly the way it was, and her friends as the grown-ups — a little odd and flawed, of course, but adult, with children and marriages and mortgages — that they were.

So she didn't know quite how to answer. "They're good," she finally said. "I mean, the staff has more or less stayed the same, and we're back in the top five, so everyone's happy. Lots of research. Derek Shepherd is doing some really great Alzheimer's research again, Meredith Grey's working on linking endocrine secretions in the brain to kidney overproduction and diabetes, Alex Karev has set up a pro bono network connecting surgeons to kids who need surgeries in Third World countries …"

"Dr. Karev?" he chortles in amazement.

"Yeah, Karev," she rolls her eyes, because even Arizona can't believe it. "Bailey's working on pancreatic cancer now, Sloan's on new reconstructive scalpel techniques." She doesn't like listing these things, feeling like she's defending people so she asks, "And what have you been up to, since you won the Avery?" and that thankfully distracts him for several minutes. She wishes she could text Henry and make him magically appear but that would be in poor taste. And obvious.

Somehow they segue away from Cristina and into the current work being done with laparoscopy — he's still formal and not at all Teddy's cup of tea but at least it's not so fantastically terrible. And, like the godsend he is, Henry finally, mercifully, appears. They'd made plans for dinner at the Pier.

"Henry," she calls, waving him over.

"Hey," he says, kissing her forehead quickly and handing her Hannah, who settles easily against Teddy's side, a wonderfully comforting weight. She kisses the toddler's forehead and smoothes her hair down. She sees Dr. Burke's eyebrows rise, but he says nothing.

"Hey. Henry, this is Dr. Preston Burke. He was actually chief of cardio at Seattle Grace when Cristina started her internship. Dr. Burke, this is my husband, Henry Burton, and my daughter, Hannah."

"Nice to meet you," Henry smiles, making her feel less awkward. "Cristina as an intern — I have to say, I'm glad I never saw that."

"She certainly was … intense, I'll say," he says benevolently. "Anyways, it appears that I'm holding you. Dr. Altman, it was excellent to get to meet you. Give my best to … everyone."

"Thank you," she smiles. "It was nice to meet you."

As they walk away, Henry's arm snakes around her waist and she exhales. "Wow. Now _that_ was awkward."

Henry snickers. "Yeah, I kinda picked up on that."

"He was engaged to Cristina, actually," she says, "He walked out on her at the wedding, according to Miranda."

"Whoa, now he really seems like a big jackass."

"Yeah, but, like, think about a younger Cristina. Of course she'd be into that. Plus she's totally into sleeping with the boss. You're lucky I'm straight," she teases.

"On I know it," he replies, smirking.

She laughs too, then sighs again. "He's just … I don't know. He just felt so _smug_. He was all, 'I was her first teacher' and he was creepy and all 'The Cristina I know… and I didn't want to be, you know, _no_, she's different now, and then he had won the Harper-Avery, and it was like, _really_. It just made me self-conscious and … I don't know."

"What is it?" he asks, alarms.

"It's silly," she stalls.

"Come on, Ted. Cough it up," he nudges her shoulder.

"I just … I think he seems sad. You know? And I'm happy. So, so happy," she starts.

"You know, it helps to sound convincing when you say that," he says dryly.

"No! But that's the thing. I am. I'm really, really happy. I'm happy that I'm stepping down from cardio chief. I've got you, and this one, and the next two, and I usually feel like shouting it from rooftops and being really annoying and smug about it. And there was … _something_ about him that just made me feel … I don't know, defensive. He was just so _arrogant._And so I wanted to say, yeah, Cristina's going to be the first departmental chief straight out of a fellowship in years because I'm stepping down in six months and handing it to her, to knock him down a few, but he just … He seemed so smug I didn't even want to try. Weird, right?" It is. She knows it is. She's the 40-year-old mother of a 18-month-old, and she knows this is beyond ridiculous. "He was just … I wanted to put him in his place. For being so toolish to Cristina a million years ago. But then I realized he wasn't even worth it. He wouldn't get why she's changed, and why I would be making the choice I'm making, and he'd just be … smug about it. And it was frustrating, but also, god, it just made me really, really sad for him."

He'd been lazily swinging their interlocked hands back and forth, but stops at this. "What?" she demands.

"That was kind of sweet of you, that was all," he smiles.

"What?" she asks, bewildered.

"You were defending my honor."

"Your honor?" she snorts. "No. I was justifying my honor, if anything. Did you _see_ that look he had when he saw Hannah?" she twists one of the girl's blond curls around her finger. "Could you believe it, Hannah Banana? No you could not, I bet." She tickles Hannah's stomach and she laughs merrily.

"No, you were kind of defending my honor. Don't get me wrong, I think it's pretty hot. I've spent enough time in a hospital gown to be secure in my manhood."

She laughs, and smacks him. "I still don't get how I was defending your honor, but I will _always_ take the view of you in a hospital gown."

"Oh, I know," he says. "Believe me. But you're getting all hot and bothered about some jackhole who used to be some sort of Cardio Overlord to Cristina about your decision to step down to do something for us? Yeah, you were defending my honor. And yes, I will always think it's hot."

She laughs, finally understanding, and feeling so bad for Dr. Preston Burke. "Just call me your knight in navy blue scrubs," she jokes.

His eyes darken with emotion for a second, and she remembers right then how much she really, really loves him. Before he can make the moment too sappy — because they're bad at sappy, and she's the one that always drags them down into sappy anyways — she tilts up, kisses him, Hannah cradled between them, and laughs into his mouth, just a little. "Come on," she says, breaking apart. "Let's get dinner."


	2. 2012

Here's part 2, the resolution of their last fight. I didn't say it last time, but standard disclaimers apply. Enjoy!

_January 2012_

Teddy wins the med-school debate in the end, but she wishes she didn't. It's a bitter victory (not even bittersweet), and just serves to remind her how much time they _don__'__t_ have together, how being an adult, in a marriage, requires far too much practicality. And practicality just kinda sucks.

After she comes home to him coughing up blood all over the kitchen, their fight is put off indefinitely, because he has a string of nasty, persistent tumors, and for the first time since they decided to be actually married (and probably including the period before that) she's not-so-secretly terrified that he's going to die. He's in and out of the hospital, but mostly in, and she makes the private deal with fate that if he lives, she'll be totally fine with him going to med school, and will cook him ramen and make him flashcards and even tutor the pretty girls in his study group, just so they remember that he is married, since they haven't even bought rings yet to serve as a constant visual reminder.

She is, as she promised, a basket case of a wife for most of his surgeries. She's fine with his first one, but only because she has a completely shredded heart (courtesy of Avery and Callie) to repair at the same time. During his second one, Bailey gets Hunt to ban her from the OR. During his third one (third one! In a month!), Owen bans her from the hospital premises entirely and makes Lexie Grey babysit her at a coffee shop downtown. During his fourth one (just a week later), Owen remembers that she did just fine when she had her own surgery to perform, and he schedules a quadruple bypass concurrent to Henry's procedure. After the nameless intern makes the first incision, his job for the rest of surgery is to run back and forth and report back to her about Henry's surgery every 20 minutes, and everyone (besides the intern) is happy. From then on, it's decided that during Henry's surgeries, Teddy is to have a surgery as well.

Which is good, because it's basically the only OR time she is logging. She's in the hospital more than ever, but that's only because she's stubborn and won't go home if he's not home. Some nights, when he's doing alright, someone convinces her to sleep in an on-call room, but mostly she crashes in a chair or splits his hospital twin. She spends most of her time with him, grilling Bailey and researching treatment options, since the old treatments are not working, and passes most of her surgeries off to Cristina. Cristina has to handle several of Henry's surgeries as well, and she feels terrible for making Cristina be humble for so long. She doesn't want a humble surgeon zapping tumors around Henry's heart. She wants a rock star.

In the downtime between his surgeries and scans and treatments, he's still researching med school options and what classes he's going to need to take, probably some sort of post-bac. It turns out to be a lot, which she could have told him, since he majored in Psych and Sociology and so hasn't even ever had basic Chem I. It's a point of contention for them, as she's still not crazy about the idea and he's not crazy about her being not-crazy about the idea.

But she orders intro textbooks off the Internet, though he gets tired easily and so doesn't study too much. She entertains him with stories about their future together, trips to Italy and painting the bathroom, but her voice is always tinged with desperation. He never buys into her fear but finds it tiring, and he pulls away from her a little bit. She gets it; it's wearying. So even though they're together all the time, she's mostly on her laptop in his room obsessively researching treatments and he's getting in touch with this support group for patients with chronic conditions. He's calm and good-humored about the process and grimly optimistic about the whole prognosis— honestly, few of his tumors pose serious-serious risks — but she knows she's driving him a little bit nuts. She can't help it though. VHL is scary. And someone has to be properly scared of it.

His scans begin to look clearer after six weeks, and they're spending more time at home, finally — she's kind of part time until she calms down enough to feel like she can leave him alone without having him cough up blood all over the kitchen. And she's sent away for a course catalog from U-Dub so he can start enrolling in the prereqs, which arrives one random Wednesday early in the New Year (their first Christmas together is … interesting. And spent in the hospital.). She puts it aside, where he can see it, before going in for a quick aortic valve transplant she promised Owen she'd do. When she comes home he's flipping through it on the couch.

"See any interesting classes that will work, time-wise?" she asks, setting her purse on the counter nervously.

"Yeah, actually," he says. "'Social Work for Social Justice.' Meets Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:30-4:30 next fall."

She furrows her brow. "Pretty sure that's not a prereq for med school," she says neutrally.

"No, but it is a first-semester class for a Master's in Social Work," he says, and she feels overwhelming relief. Because a Master's program is two years, maybe three, and he can complete that without it taking over their lives.

"A Master's, huh?" she asks, sliding next to him on the couch and leaning in so they can share the book. "In Social Work."

"Yeah," he says. "After being in the Group For People Who Live in the Hospital and Stuff, I started thinking. Not everyone gets a hot hot doctor to swoop in and give him insurance. There were patient's advocates in the hospital but I was too hardheaded to find them when I was getting sick, but it's something I can finally see myself doing." He inhales. "You know, after college, all I did was play ball, and then I was working on my MBA when I got sick, but I'm more interested in this. U-Dub has a social work program, and I can do field work in a hospital, even do some dual coursework in a Master's in Public Health. Or finish up the MBA. Who knows, you know?"

She looks at the glossy photos of the coursebook and then at him. He would honestly probably be pretty perfect at this. "And this is what you want to do? No med school?"

"Well, I know you'll like this one a little better."

"It's shorter for sure, but that's not important. It's your life, Henry, and I don't want to be the naggy wife who stops you from doing something you really want to do. I don't want to be that wife."

"You're not that wife," he says, and she knows he's being honest. "But you were right that it's a damn long time, and it's something that'll have a big impact on _both_of us. As people, as a couple. It's _our_ life, not just mine. So I want you to be OK with this too."

"I would be ok with you going to med school," she says, because she wants him to know that. She wants him to be happy. She doesn't care about the other stuff.

"Eventually, yeah, you'd come around to it, but you did have a point, that it would take forever, and that it has a huge impact on both of us that I wasn't talking about, and you know what? I want to do stuff with you," he says, swinging their interlaced hands back and forth lazily. "I want to go on vacations and fix up the kitchen and, hell, maybe even have kids. I want to actually _work_, get to help people. So yeah, I want to go to med school. I'd _love_ to go be a doctor. But I'm not going to get to do any of that other stuff if I go to med school. Especially not if every few months or years I need to take time off for surgery."

She pauses. He's bitter, just a little, she can tell. She knows it's about a lot of things — being sick, feeling a little pressed for time (he's already 42), feeling like he wasted time playing ball when he could have been doing the things he wants to do now. He's making a practical choice, for them and for their future, instead of making the crazy-awesome-dream choice. She wishes he _could_ go to med school, because he wants to and this choice hurts him. She doesn't feel like she won, because it wasn't something for her to win; instead, she just feels disappointed because she knows he's disappointed.

"And I'm going to have that time, you know. The surgeries are just annoying. This program'll be three years, tops. Not five to 10."

She feels terrible, now. "Henry …"

"I'm joking," he says. "I'm going to be fine, you know that, right? This isn't something that kills you automatically. It's chronic, not terminal. And I've got you researching procedures and scaring half the nurses and surgeons in America. I'm going to be fine."

She snuggles down into the crook of his arm. "Can I say I'm sorry, even though I'm a terrible dream-killer?" She's trying to make light of the situation, but now that he's made a decision, she honestly feels awful. And she's trying to comfort him, not make it about her, which is something she knows she does more often than not, and he doesn't deserve it.

He laughs, and the sound rumbles through his chest and into hers, a reminder that he's very much alive. "We'll make new dreams," he says, scooting down and sliding his hands under her shirt and across her stomach, linking them and tugging her closer to him. His motions make her shiver a little. "I mean, look at us right now. We just solved a fight without me having to resort to coughing up blood to win again. We're getting pretty good at this marriage thing."

"We are," she murmurs, because it's crazy but true.

"I'm fine," he repeats. "I'm happy. We'll make new dreams."

"Vacation, kitchen … kids?" she repeats. She's not sure what she thinks about the entire proposition. She's never _not_ wanted kids, but the right guy has never been there. Now he is there, complete with a genetic tumor condition that could always flare up at any point in time and, most frighteningly, be passed along to a child. But she … likes the idea. Like most things surrounding their relationship, it's risky (she knows that now better than ever), but tempting.

His expression turns serious. "I mean, it's something we should talk about. It's not … It's not what we signed up for."

"Henry, none of this is what either of us signed up for," she points out. "And I'd say I'm liking it a lot right now." She leans up to kiss him softly.

He kisses back, but pulls away pretty quickly. "What I'm saying is," he starts gently, "is that, yes, I want kids, with you. But I know that it's asking a lot of you, with the genes and the possibility that something could happen and you'd be left to raise a teenager alone."

"Hey," she says, "What happened to VHL being chronic-not-terminal, mister?"

"It's still a risk, even with gene therapy to make sure a kid doesn't inherit it" he shoots back, and it's one of the first deadly-serious things she's heard him say about his disease — usually, he's absolutely, fundamentally opposed to treating it like a possible life sentence and not something that he simply has to deal with, like eczema. "Which is why it's your decision. And I'll respect that, completely."

She pauses. It's a serious, serious thing to consider. She wants them, with Henry, but she's terrified of losing him and raising them alone.

But still … "I … want them," she confesses. "I think I need some more time to be sure that you, me, we, can do it, but," she twists her body around and pushes herself up on her tiptoes, so that his arms are looped around her waist and her palms are resting on his shoulders but otherwise they are not touching, she is hovering above him, and he gets an irresistible look in his eyes, "until we're absolutely positive, I say we need to practice."

Later — much later, after they've had copious amounts of practice — he slips out of bed to go print out the application to start working on it. Noticing him at his laptop, she slips out of bed and pulls on her (his) shirt, and leans against his chair, running his fingers through his hair. "Last chance — you sure this is what you want to do?" she asks, because it's her duty.

"You know, now I'm getting the idea that you like me at home all the time, ready and available to be ravished," he jokes.

She rolls her eyes and gives him a light shove, because by this point they both know that she needs him as much, if not more, than he needs her. "I actually think you'll be an amazing patient advocate, for what it's worth," she says, and she means it. "I'm just, you know. Checking."

He leans up and smiles. 'Thank you for checking, but yes. And this isn't you winning a fight — don't think it is."

"I don't," she says immediately, because she doesn't. "Don't think I do."

"I don't," he says, filing the form in manila envelope marked 'Important.' "This is an us thing, and a me thing, and a you thing, and this is the way I can get what I want to do and you can get what you want to do, and we get what we want to."

His words hit her. She's been talking to Owen, to Arizona, to everyone, about the next five to 10 years and her life and their lives, but now, after he found a solution that actually works, she can see their marriage stretching on indefinitely, not because they got married and then fell in love, but because they are now, actually, a married couple. It's a subtle distinction, but it makes her feel — despite the uncertainty of him going back to school and his health and the new debate about kids — absolutely secure in their marriage. And after two months of worry and uncertainty, it's a damn good feeling.


	3. 2026

Here's part 3! Thanks so much for all the feedback! I should be able to finish up the piece sometime next week. Keep an eye out.

2026

One of her mothers might be one of Teddy's closest friends, but she is going to _kill_ Sofia Torres. Absolutely murder. Stuff the body in a nice thick box and … she should really stop. Before she gets too descriptive and people got suspicious. Besides, she has her own daughter to kill right about now.

"Explain again," she says in her best patient-mentor-surgeon, best-nonjudgmental-mother voice, "Why exactly you thought this was a good idea?"

Hannah squirms under her mother's deadly gaze. "Well," she starts. "I mean, like, so many other girls in my grade got one and I asked and…"

"What happened when you asked, Hannah?"  
>"You said not yet," Hannah admits, defeated.<p>

"We said _not__yet_," Teddy repeats. "We said not until you were a freshman in college. We said eighth grade was too young."

"Right. But then I was talking to Sofia and she told me that she was friends with the guy that did hers, and that he wouldn't care that I wasn't 18 because she would say we were cousins, and he was completely safe and she didn't get an infection and that since it's December and I won't be in a swimsuit forever it would be fine and," Hannah starts bawling, tears streaming down her face, "and so she and Zola drove me and I just, I _really_ wanted one, Mom, and everyone else has one — "

"Wait. _Zola_ drove?" Of course Meredith Grey's daughter is somehow involved.

Hannah nods. "When she was back for fall break, since Sofia doesn't have a car, you know."

"So Zola _and_Sofia were both in on this?"

"Mom! Come on! It's not like it's a tattoo!"

"No, it's just a pierced, _infected_belly button, that your father and I told you specifically that you _could__not__get!_" She throws up her arms. She might be able to repair a completely shredded aorta or build a heart out of stem cells and pig valves and glue (literally!), but she can't take tears and she can't take her teenaged daughter's faux-rebellion. She is the nervous, neurotic parent when it comes to _anything_, especially teenager-stuff; Henry handles situations like these. _Where__the__hell__is__he?_

Max and Sam are doing their absolute best not to laugh at their sister, and failing miserably, which only makes Hannah cry more. Teddy sighs. "Boys, go play the Wii," she lifts a hand and gestured _anywhere__but__here_.

"But we're not done with our homework! We can't play the Wii until we're done with our homework!" Max tries. His face is _almost_ earnest, but she could have seen through his protestations anyways

She sighs. "Yeah, suddenly, the night that your sister gets grounded_until__her__sixteenth__birthday_ is the night you suddenly care about your homework. Go."

Thankfully, the boys flutter out to the living room, leaving her with Hannah. "Sixteenth birthday?" Hannah whines. "Mom, come on, I'm sorry…"

Henry walks in just then. "Hey babe," he smiles at her, before getting a better look at the situation. "Uh, whoa. Hey, Banana. Did you have a good day today? Cause I'm gonna guess not really."

"There is a God," Teddy mutters, eyes skyward, before turning to her daughter. "Hannah, do you want to explain to your father what I discovered today when I was picking you up from basketball?"

That of course only sets her off more, and she starts whimpering, "I know — Sofia said — she promised it wouldn't — I'm sorry, Daddy, I know you're mad."

"What happened, Hannah?"

Teddy cocks her head to say _oh__you__are__for__sure__the__one__explaining__this_. Hannah shakes her head vehemently. Teddy stares her down. Hannah finally relents. " …"

"Banana. Slow down. We'll work whatever this is out, but you need to start explaining it to me in a calm voice." Teddy takes a good look at Henry, and realized how tired he looks, then remembers (duh, of course, it's been on the calendar for six month) that his big fundraiser next week, so he had probably stayed late to wrangle donors and work on speeches and seating arrangements, and now she just feels like hell for losing her cool and not being able to outwit an almost-14-year-old.

Hannah nods and takes a deep breath. "So I know you and Mom said not until I was 18 and in college, but, like, _all_the girls on the basketball team have their bellybuttons pierced, and Sofia does, and she's not 18, and so she told me that she could talk to the guy that did hers and he'd do mine too, and I said OK, so when Zola was in town we all went over and I got my bellybutton pierced, and I was taking really good care of it, but it got infected and I didn't want to tell you and Mom and so …" Instead of finishing her story (and Teddy knew, at least, that her daughter must be pretty damn remorseful, because she didn't babble like that) Hannah lifts her shirt, revealing a swollen, yellow-green bruise ringing her belly button, with a dense cluster of clots directly over the actual piercing.

"Oh, Hannah," Henry says, then asks, "When did this start? Does it hurt?"  
>"The Doctor already asked the questions, Daddy," Hannah replies, clearly relieved not to be getting a second ass-kicking. Teddy rolls her eyes at the derisive nickname, which her kids had given her after one too many overprotective spells. "She figured it out when I wiped the sweat off my face with my shirt."<p>

"She needs to go in," Teddy interjects. She doesn't really, of course, Teddy can very well ask just about anyone to write her the scrip for a strong antibiotic, but she's just so irritated with Hannah right now. She said no, and Hannah did it anyways.

"Alright," Henry says, "Ted, why don't you call Arizona and Callie to let them know that their daughter's aiding and abetting in delinquency, and I'll talk to Hannah about how she's probably not leaving the house until she's 16 years old, and then we'll take her to the hospital?"

Hannah slumps, pouty again, and asks, "How do you do that?"

"Do what?" Henry quizzes.

"Mom said I was grounded till I was 16 too," she mutters.

They looked at each other and shrugged. "Parent thing," Henry says, before kissing Teddy's forehead, muttering "It'll be fine," and leading Hannah out of the kitchen.

Sitting down for a second, she lets herself zone out to the sound of the boys on the Wii before picking up her cell phone and haphazardly dialing the Robbins-Torres home. Topher answers before she realizes she does not know how she will phrase this, and Arizona is on the line within seconds.

"Hey, Arizona, how are you? How was that surgery?" Small talk. Yes. Good.

"It went pretty well. The kid was doing great in post-op, then we hit up Topher's school play. You'd be surprised at how well sixth-graders can pull off _Rent_. Anyways. What's up? You sound tense."

"Yeah, I guess … Hannah did something idiotic, and she got Sofia to help her out in her idiocy, and so I wanted to tell you, and let you know that while I kind of am ticked at Sofia because she's older and she could probably convince Hannah to try and bicycle to the moon, I'm totally pissed at Hannah and she's being grounded by Henry right now until she's, like sixteen, so I am absolutely not passing off any …"

"Teddy. Sofia's been smoking in locker rooms at school lately. We get it; she's not a saint. We're working on it. What'd she get Hannah to do?"

"Hannah wanted her bellybutton pierced, and we talked and said no, and so she went to Sofia, who has this friend, and Sofia helped her get one done. And apparently Zola drove, because of course this couldn't just involve one kid, you know? And so of course the damn thing got infected, but she didn't want to tell us because we'd get mad, so now my 13-year-old daughter's stomach is swollen and covered in bruises, because she's a teenager so she's going to do stupid stuff."

"Whoa. Back up. Our kid took your kid to some shady undergrad bellybutton-piercer and convinced him that it was totally OK to give an eighth-grader a bellybutton ring without her parents' consent? Did you get an address out of Hannah? Because I can totally get an address out of Sofia. We can go there. I have a baseball bat."

She laughs, relieved. "I think we're fine dealing with this in-house. Believe me, disappointing Henry will be punishment enough for this one. Well, that, and grounding her until the thing has healed over."

"Teddy, I am so, so sorry. We'll talk to her. And take away lots of cool stuff. And you should probably call Derek too. He'll probably have a conniption when he hears that Zola drove them."

She sighs, because Arizona is right, and hangs up. Before she has a chance to dial Shepherd, though, Henry and Hannah come back in, and Hannah, now no longer crying, says, "Mom, I know what I did was wrong and that you said no and I totally didn't listen. This is like karmic retribution. So I'm really sorry, I should have listened to you."

"Hannah — thank you, first off, that's very mature of you — but the piercing wasn't why I was so mad. Hannah, you got an _infection_. This could have ended really, really badly. Please don't — I know I kind of … yell … sometimes, that I'm like the annoying mom, but if there's a possibility you might be hurt, or sick … _Please_, for my sake, _please_ don't ever hide it from me again. I need … I need to know when you're not feeling well, so that we can make decisions. All of us, together."

A type of realization crosses Hannah's face. "Oh. Right. Of course. Again, Mom, I'm really sorry."

"Thank you, baby," Teddy said, crossing her arms tightly around her daughter's shoulders and holding her tight. "Now, let's call Mark and get a scrip for that infection. I'm really not feeling a four-hour wait in Seattle Grace's ED right now."

She smiles at Henry and he smiles back, and she feels triumphant: Team-parenting at its finest. They're good at this — parenting, family, kids. Together he's their rock-solid foundation, the calm, the quiet voice of reason who really runs everything, and she's the organized go-go-go one who remembers permission slips and signs everyone up for soccer and keeps their daily momentum going. It works. They work.

Later — after they've filled the scrip at CVS and taken Hannah's laptop out of her room and checked over the boys' homework and talked to Derek and made a few phone calls for work (that was Henry. And they accused her of being the workaholic parent) and they're in bed and she's reading a journal and he's still reviewing stuff for the fundraiser — he says, "Babe," in a questioning voice, but not looking at her.

"Mmmm?" she replies, because she is really interested in the article.

"Hannah's infection … there's no way that's genetic, right?" Henry does that, worried sometimes that whatever the kids got might be somehow related to his VHL, no matter how many times she assured him that it wasn't and he admitted it was irrational. He was especially prone to it with Hannah, their tempting-fate baby. The boys had been planned and genes screened appropriately; Hannah had been a "yes-let's-do-it-and-have-a-family" whim and thus her genes hadn't received the same careful scrutiny pre-pregnancy.

So she knows by now that the best response is to put the journal aside and slide down sideways to look at his profile. "No. She just has sensitive skin. Remember how many rashes she got when she was in diapers? And we always buy her hypoallergenic earrings; she just didn't know to tell the guy to give her a hypoallergenic ring. And then she was scared to tell us so it got worse."

"Yeah, she does have a pretty scary mom," he says noncommittally, and she can tell it's kind of bugging him still.

"Henry," she says, pulling herself close to him and running her fingers down his arm. "Come on. You know it's irrational. She has sensitive skin. How exactly is this related to your chronic tumor condition, even a little?" She strokes his cheek before resting her own on his shoulder. "It's not. If anything I should have picked up on it quicker. And if I can't blame myself any time one of them gets sick for not preventing it, and you can't blame yourself for causing it. Deal?"

He finally relents, putting his work aside and turning so that their bodies are aligned, his head propped up on his shoulder and their noses inches apart. He is strong and (relatively) healthy for 58: He's going gray, of course, and his scarred body is getting a little lax, but the VHL has been under control for years, more or less, regulated with regular checkups and an imposingly high pile of pills he takes daily that suppresses tumor growth and keeps his body from rejecting his donated organs and prevents him from becoming a diabetic.

She is a vigilant wife: She finds new procedures and keeps in contact with basically any and every genetics researcher and makes him go to checkups more frequently than his doctors recommend to stay abreast of the Whack-a-Tumor game fate seems to be playing with his body. Every eight or ten months something inevitably crops up that low-dose radiation can't take care of and he has to go into surgery, and she usually schedules a longer, more complicated procedure concurrent to it so she can keep the freak-outs at bay, because the five times she has not she has burst into the OR, every time, "just to see how it's going." The kids are fine with it; they don't see the disease as menacing. It is a fact of life, just like the fact that Henry will always be their soccer coach is a fact. Henry is typically as accepting as the kids are; she's the only one whose mind always hums _what__if__what__if__what__if_.

"Deal," he finally says, inhaling deeply.

"Arizona offered me the use of her baseball bat, you know," she says, resting her head on the pillow and laughing lightly. "So that we can go after the guy. And I'm pretty sure Derek booked a plane ticket down to San Francisco to yell at Zola."

He laughs. "Glad that we aren't the only ones still trying to get the hang of this parenting thing."

"I don't know we'll ever have it 100% down," she says, laughing and rolling ont her back. "But god, Henry … we are doing well. We really, really are."

"Minus the delinquent belly-button-piercing 13-year-old," Henry replies, smirking.

She starts laughing heartily then. It's been a long day, and she suspects there are many more to come as Hannah becomes a full-blown teenager, followed way too closely by the boys. But they're here, together, 16 years later, and it's enough. There are the daily struggles, like Hannah today, and there's the long-term ones, like the hours she works and his VHL.

"Minus the delinquent belly-button-piercing 13-year-old," she agrees. "You know what they call the belly-button-piercing? The gateway piercing." It was true. Lexie Sloan had told her. How the hell Lexie Sloan knew, she didn't know, but it was apparently common knowledge.

"God. How many years ago was it that she was playing with American Girl dolls? Oh, wait, that was last month," he says, his tone light but biting. "Thank God she has the pain tolerance of a baby seal. Otherwise the next thing would be one of those ear things." He pantomimes a gauged-out ear.

She laughs too, because it's true. Although her father has more scars than a surgical student's cross-stitch pillow and her mother is the one constantly doing the stitching, Hannah barely survived getting three stitches above her eye from Mark last year when she got a basketball to the face. Mark had come to their house so she wouldn't even have to go in, but she'd still spent at least 45 minutes crying before Mark had even put the needle within an inch of her face. "Yeah, I bet you've never been more grateful she got my high-maintenance personality."

"I'm actually pretty happy most days with how much of you she got," he confesses.

She kisses him, lightly, without tongue. It's not passionless, but it's certainly not an opening act to something more tonight. It's affectionate. They're old, and kind of tired, and mostly just happy to have each other and their kids, and it's exactly that type of kiss: Enough.

"Good night," she says, rolling over onto her stomach. He wraps an arm around her waist, kisses her hair, mutters good night. Within minutes, they're both dreamlessly asleep.


	4. 2015

Part IV here! I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. This one is kind of longer. We've got one more happy moment after this. Let me know what you think!

_2015_

"So we have a wedding anniversary next month," Henry remarks one day over breakfast in early November.

"We have an official wedding anniversary next month," she counters, distractedly wiping cinnamon-pumpkin puree from Sam's mouth, nose, and eyes. That's the nice thing about the way their relationship started: They get the official wedding anniversary, in December, when they did the whole courthouse thing, and they get what she considers their _real_ anniversary, in May, when he wore her down and they started actually being a couple. "I like our other one better."

"It does have its perks," he agrees, smirking lewdly, and she smacks him lightly, because she knows exactly where his mind is. "But people say this one is important. Five years. They name plates and cheap jewelry after this one."

"People say, do they?" she laughs, then turns to tag-team Max's mess. "What do people say you should do on an anniversary?" They've never really been big on anniversaries — Year One he was in the hospital, Year Two she was eight months pregnant, Year Three they'd forgotten about it until the week before and couldn't find a babysitter, Year Four she'd been seven months pregnant with the twins.

"Dinner, dancing, hot tubs," he says, and she laughs.

Picking up Hannah to get her dressed, she leans over and kisses him. "I might be high-maintenance about everything from airport pickups to what type of organic produce we buy, but I honestly do not need a big anniversary thing. Promise."

She jokes about being high-maintenance, but the truth is that they have one of the most low-key marriages of anyone she knows. They have differences of opinion often but resolve them fairly quickly; they have a lot to juggle between their jobs and three kids in two years but simply just keep texting and talking. It's work, yes, but she doesn't think it's hard with Henry. She supposes she should consider herself lucky but by this point it's simply her view of her and him, together. Marriage was something they eased into without pressure or expectations: Married, then friends, then a couple was a path she heartily endorses. He'd asked her, around the time Mark and Lexie's wedding invitation came, if she ever craved the dress-and-party route. While she'd always expected a relationship to go a certain way and that way included a kickass party and a great dress, she absolutely did not feel like she'd missed out on anything.

"We'll see about that," Henry smirks, and she stops.

'Henry," she chastises gently, "Don't plan anything big, OK? I know you. That's a … secret-plan face."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," he proclaims innocently. He scoops up the boys in one coordinated motion and puts one on each hip. "But I bet the three of us guys can get ready quicker than you two."

She laughs. "Not even trying if I've got Princess Hannah on my team."

Somehow thirty minutes later all three kids are ready to go (Hannah did take longer than both boys), and they drop Hannah off at her 2-year-olds program before driving to the hospital. They drop the twins off at day care before heading off to their prospective departments with a promise to meet up later for lunch if they can. Hunt's called a departmental meeting for the attendings, and she's got one of her fifth-years leading rounds on her patients. She's got two boring surgeries today — a coronary graft and a valve replacement. It's a longer shift than normal, but then she has tomorrow off, before a totally cool surgery on Friday where she and Cristina are going to reroute the veins of a woman with Turner's Syndrome. The nanny is picking up Hannah from preschool and the boys from the hospital at 2, so the kids are all taken care of. Henry has a tough day; he's got a court appointment in the morning to deal with the estate of a patient who fell into a coma without writing a will.

She changes quickly from her jeans, boots, and sweater into scrubs and a long-sleeved grey T-shirt. On her way out she runs into Arizona, sucking a lollipop that she'd swiped from the peds nurses' workstation, also on her way to Owen's meeting.

"What do you and Callie do for anniversaries?" she asks as her friend bounces along next to her.

"Eh. Last year we went to a resort in Palm Springs for a long weekend," she cracks the lollipop to get to the Tootsie roll. "I'm never patient enough to count licks on these things. Why?"

"Henry pointed out this morning it's our fifth anniversary next month and I think he was fishing for what I wanted to do," she replies, immediately noticing that her friend turned bright red before putting on a painstakingly uninterested face. "Why? Arizona Robbins, what do you know?"

"What — I — know — nothing! Absolutely nothing!"

"No way! You're roped into the … whatever! You're involved!" She grabs her friend by the elbow. "He's planning something! A month in advance! What the hell?"

"You have an incredibly sweet husband who, yes, asked me a few questions so he can plan something super-thoughtful and amazing. That's all you're getting."

"He doesn't need to plan anything," she replies. "I know he's sweet and wonderful and thoughtful — we don't need a day or something to acknowledge that." She gets it on one hand — marriage should be celebrated, whatever — but she doesn't want him to think that she wants or needs some outsized effort. They don't need to rent a blimp or whatever to do so.

"Just let him surprise you."

"You've gone to the dark side, Arizona Robbins," she says. "Come on. One hint?"

"Ooh look meeting! Woo important things to share! Let's go learn new and exciting things about hospital policy!" Arizona speedwalks into the conference room.

She knows that if she's going to crack anyone it's going to be Arizona. But Arizona has quickly taken her spot next to her wife, who looks slightly alarmed at Arizona's frenetic behavior. "This isn't over," Teddy hisses as she sits next to her friend. Arizona pretends to ignore her, though, and pretty soon Owen is droning on about the schedule for the next six months' worth of disaster drills.

She meets Dr. Chow right after the meeting to head into surgery, so she didn't get a chance to pester Arizona anymore. Twenty minutes later they're elbow deep in her happy place: a chest cavity. She's trying to get Dr. Chow (who is the most sensible of all residents: married to a college sweetheart who works at Microsoft) to help her plot to crack Arizona. She's doing a damn good job of resisting when Lyla, her scrub nurse, brings her a cell and says, "Dr. Altman? It's your husband."

"Thank you," she says, before, "Babe? You there?"

"Hey, yeah," he says. "Sorry — do you have your hands in someone's chest again? You know, I still think it's creepy when you do that."

"Most couples argue about whether or not it's okay to have a conversation from the toilet, we have this," she rationalizes. "Have you been to court yet?"

"I'm actually about to go in — the judge's docket is running over so we got pushed," he says. "Would lunch around 1 work? What time is your next surgery?"

"Two — I should be out of this around one. So do you want to maybe grab the boys and get a little picnic around then? We can eat outside. The second surgery should take around four hours so I'll probably be home around seven."

"A picnic, huh?" he asks, and she can hear his grin.

"Yeah. It's spontaneous, romantic, costs next-to-nothing, and both parties know about it ahead of time."

"Ahhhh, someone's been talking to Arizona," he surmises, and she knows he's not mad but that she's lucky he finds her charming.

"You know it," she says. "I'm trying to get Dr. Chow here to plot to get her to crack but she's not biting."

"I always liked Dr. Chow," he says. "Arizona's not gonna crack."

"Come on, a hint," she whines.

"I'll grab the boys and sandwiches and meet you at one," he says.

"Good luck in court!" she calls before she hears the click. She nods at Lila to take the cell back. "Come on, Dr. Chow, I can get you into some _gooooood_ surgeries," she teases. She likes Dr. Chow, she just worries that the highly competent doctor doesn't have much fun with the rowdy, gossipy, SGMW crowd. "Anyone else? Surgeries in exchange for cracking Dr. Robbins about what my husband is planning for our anniversary?"

"How do you do it?" Dr. Simonson, the second-year resident assisting, blurts out.

"What do you mean?" she murmurs, deftly maneuvering the arteries.

"I mean … the husband! And the three kids! How did you balance this with being a surgeon? You even went back to being chief of cardio!"

She looks at the girl — because, even if you're 27 years old, if you're asking that question, you're a girl — carefully and with credulity. She barely pays attention to intern gossip these days but this one was maybe dating a third-year resident who was also sleeping with a nurse? Anyways. She's a good surgeon, and quick, and she likes having her on her service. "Just until Dr. Yang finishes her trial," she says, ducking the question. "And … you just do. When you meet someone who's worth it, you'll make it all work. Your surgeries, his surgeries, the babysitters, the preschools, the jobs, the mortgage … If you want to make it work you'll find a way. Now, was that you volunteering to crack Dr. Robbins?"

Everyone in the OR exhales, even laughs a little. "No, ma'am," she says, smiling a little.

When she finally meets her boys outside the daycare, she wisely doesn't mention the anniversary. Henry already managed to get sandwiches, and they quickly head outside. Both boys are crawling, and Max is even walking, so they help the boys scoot around the grass before it's time for her to head back in.

"Good job not asking about the anniversary," he says, smirking, as he walks her back to the surgical floor. "Excellent self-control there."

"Wasn't it?" she asks proudly. "Listen …"

"It's an anniversary. A guy should be allowed to surprise his girl," he says stubbornly.

"I know, will you just listen?" she says, thwacking him lightly. "I promise not to ruin your surprise. I will. I will ignore your secret-plan faces and not give you a hard time if you're talking with Arizona in the cafeteria or whatever. I'll be good. I'll be patient," he smirks. "But you don't need to do this, you know that, right? Like not even at all, even a little bit. I'm _happy_ spending our anniversary sleeping in and then taking the kids to a zoo. That's what I like most about being married to you."

"Sleeping in?" he says, but she knows he gets it.

"Yes. The sleeping in, and the movie nights, and the arguing about who has to get the kid who's crying at 2 a.m. That's exactly what I like most about being married to you."

He kisses her, lightly. "I know. But I'm still doing something special for you for our anniversary."

"All right, then, you're on," she says.

"What?"

"Arizona says you're doing something amazing. So. Get your amazed face ready, mister."

He groans, lightly. "Sometimes, I actually do forget that you're the second-most competitive surgeon in the hospital."

She alarmed. "Who's the first?" she demands.

"Cristina Yang. Come on. Even you'll give it to her," and she agrees.

The next few weeks are super-busy: There's Thanksgiving, of course, but Henry needs to go in for a round of radiation and then surgery for some minor stomach tumors, which always freaks her out. For a robotic surgery it's a bit of a rocky recovery, and she wonders whether his anniversary surprise is still on. She thinks so: In fact, it feels like most of the other doctors are in on it. Owen and Cristina do for sure, since Owen is terrible at poker faces; if Arizona knows, Mark and Callie know; if Cristina knows, the Greys, Shepherd, Karev, Avery and Kempner know; Miranda knows everything, anyways. She's found the perfect gift for Henry — the fifth anniversary is wood, and she found him a 1905 Louisville Slugger, the first year that bats were signed — but she has no idea when to give it to him. Their anniversary is on a Thursday, during his first week back to work, and she knows is that whatever is happening regarding their anniversary is going to happen on Saturday night. They spend their actual anniversary dealing with a sick Sam, then she passes out while filling out insurance claims during a movie. All in all, it's the wedding anniversary that she would want. She mumbles that to him once he wakes her up and they go to bed. "Just wait till Saturday," he replies, waggling his eyebrows a little.

On Saturday, they start the day off with their usual workout in the basement, then a big Saturday brunch with the kids, but when she comes out of the shower she discovers that he's gone, and so are her babies. He's left a video message frozen on the downstairs TV, so she quickly flicks that on. "Happy fifth anniversary," TV-Henry says. "I know you're dying to know what's going on, Ted, but guess what?" he smirks. "Too bad." She laughs a little. "Now, the kids are gone for the day, totally out of your hair. Don't worry, they're safe with Lexie and Meredith. They're totally expecting six calls, by the way," TV-Henry continues. "And I've got some prep to do, but don't worry. Arizona, Cristina, and Miranda are going to be by to start your afternoon in about —" TV-Henry checked his watch. "Twenty minutes. Or, noon, if my super-awesome prediction of when you'll watch this video doesn't quite hold up." She checks her watch. It's 11:38. "Anyways, Theodora Altman, I love you. I'll see you tonight."

She's incredibly touched by the silly video, and quickly rushes to dry her hair, throw on jeans. What could they possibly be doing today? She's on the phone with Meredith (who assures her that the kids have been dropped off, that Hannah is playing with Zola and Sofia, and the boys are watching _Yo__Gabba__Gabba_) when her doorbell rings.

"Surprise!" Arizona says, kissing her on the cheek and coming in. "Are you ready? Henry said you'd be ready."

"I mean, yes, I think, but where are we going?" She tugs on her plain flannel T-shirt and cardigan.

"We are going to lunch, then shopping, then the spa," Arizona replies. "And you look perfect! Come on. Let's go."

"You still haven't told me what's going on," Teddy complains as Arizona hustles her out to her SUV.

"We're your bridal party," Cristina informs her. "Your fake pretend bridal party."

"Yang!" Miranda says quickly, disgusted and alarmed. "Remember how this is all a _surprise_?"

"What?" Cristina complains, somewhat reasonably. "She needs to know what's going on if she's going to, like, appreciate the day at all. Besides, all my emails said secret until the 12th. It's the 12th."

"Oh my god, is he planning some sort of vow renewal?" She hopes not, because while, yes, romantic, that would kind of be embarrassing and she does _not_ have a clue what she would say, and he was at a completely unfair advantage for coming up with something amazing and profound.

"Not quite," Arizona says, looking irritated at Cristina. "But you are going to need a dress." They pile into the car, Miranda and Arizona both getting their punches in at Cristina.

After lunch they head out shopping. After Arizona assures her she doesn't need a white dress, she chooses a drop-dead gorgeous navy dress, tight and flattering and with a deep neckline ringed with embellishments. The three of them all choose the same burned-gold color for their dresses, making her increasingly suspicious that she's going to need vows. When they're on the way to the spa, she starts writing out a list on her grocery-store receipt, just in case.

"You can throw that away, you're not going to need it," Cristina insists.

"You're all wearing matchy-matchy dresses and insisting you're my bridesmaids. I'm going to keep it just in case," she pointedly insists.

"Fine, but you're not going to need it," Cristina sing-songs. She's absolutely lost as to what her crazy husband might be planning.

After the spa, Arizona announces that it's time for them to get dressed — even though she still doesn't know what they're doing. If it's not renewing their vows, she can only think that it's a fancy dinner, but if it is, there wouldn't have been a reason for the girls to buy dresses too.

The spa allows them to dress there, before they get back into Arizona's car and head to Rover's. Henry is waiting outside. Her three friends quickly scatter, Arizona kissing Henry on the cheek before they head inside.

"Henry, what's going on?" she insists, gently kissing him. "We're not renewing our vows, are we? Because I tried writing some down, but I have to tell you, they're pretty bad."

"Not quite," he says, grinning. "Remember when I asked you a few months ago if there was anything you thought you'd missed out on, us getting married the way we did?"

"Yes, and I said _nothing_," she replies.

"Wrong. You said you missed out on wearing a great dress and having a kickass party."

Realization begins to dawn on her. "Great dress," she says, motioning to her great dress.

"Kickass party," he agrees, jerking his head toward the restaurant.

"So everyone knows about this?"

"Basically," he grins. "But yes, this was the thought. I personally prefer the way we got married — fewer thank-you notes — but I did think, it'd be nice to celebrate this at least once, with friends and family and the whole shebang. Plus," he says, "there was one thing I felt I missed out on, and I needed to fix that."

She must look a little confused, because he quickly pulls out two velvet boxes from his pocket. "Oh, my god, Henry," she says, before he even flips the boxes open.

They never did rings. At first, the reasons were obvious — they weren't _really_ married. Then they didn't want to jinx it. Then he got sick, really sick. Then she got pregnant. Then five years had passed without them even acknowledging that married people should wear wedding rings. It hadn't seemed like a big deal — she couldn't wear them to work, that was part of it — but now, suddenly, it seemed huge.

He's got two boxes, and wiggles one for her to open first. It's clearly an engagement ring: Two entwined loops, one white gold, one rose gold, braided around three diamonds. "For the kids?" she guesses, and he nods. She doesn't even bother pointing out that they were never engaged, not for more than 12 hours. It's lovely, and she holds her hand out gingerly for him to put the ring on her finger. She kisses him, deepening it until he pulls away.

"Not yet — that's just the engagement ring," he says, before opening the second box.

This one holds two rings — one for him, one for her. These are both extremely simple, old-fashioned yellow gold bands. Hers is more delicate than his, but barely, and fits perfectly next to the engagement ring. They're good rings. "It's beautiful," she whispers.

They slip the rings on each other's fingers wordlessly. Then, finally, he kisses her. When he notices her crying, though, he pulls away, before kissing each tear.

"Not the reaction I was hoping for," he admits.

"No — they're just, they're beautiful," she says. "Thank you. This was perfect." And it was. She's not sure how she deserved this, this perfect life with this extraordinary man. His disease — the possibility that he might be taken — always lurks beyond the surface, making each moment feel slightly stolen, making her appreciate the moments more. He grins, dashing away all those thoughts, and he moves to kiss her again, but she pulls back. "Come on. Let's go. We're holding up a party."

She takes her husband's hand, and tugs him into the party.


	5. 2030

Part V here! Apologies for the delay. I wrote an entirely different one, then wrote this one, then holidays happened. This, at least, is quite long. I left it ambiguous on purpose, and I'm not sure it counts as a "moment," but felt it was where the story was going more than the other chapter 5. I hope someone is still reading — let me know what you think!

_2030_

The tableau that greets Teddy when she, Hannah, and Max walk through the door is frightening but eerily familiar: Henry, his shoulders bunched together tightly, gripping the counter and, though the kids don't immediately realize it, coughing blood up into the sink.

It had been a good, but long, day until then: She'd had three successful surgeries, then met Henry and Hannah at Max's JV baseball game, a doubleheader against Sacred Heart. She and Hannah had popped out of the second game to go quickly look at prom dresses (Max's team had won the first by 15 runs), while Henry had headed back to the office to grab some paperwork before going home. She and Hannah hadn't found anything and had swung by to pick up Max and a late dinner for the four of them from Padrino's (Sam is on a student-council retreat to Vancouver for the weekend). She'd texted Henry to say they were heading home. He hadn't responded, but that wasn't unusual.

"What? Oh my god. Daddy!" Hannah notices it first, and covers her mouth.

"Henry," Teddy lunges, pushes Hannah out of the way. She scoops a towel up and helps him cough into it. "You'll be fine," she says, looking him directly in the eye, because he has to be. "You'll be fine. Hannah, take my phone, call Cristina and tell her to meet us at the hospital. Max, dial 911. Tell them we need an ambulance stat."

He pauses, wheezing a little. "When did this start? Is there any pain?"

He shakes his head, his eyes fearful, and she helps him lean against the kitchen table. "I had some discomfort this afternoon, but other than that, nothing."

She nods. She's seen his latest scans (about three months ago, they were getting a little lax) and his latest blood-sugar checks, and there hadn't been anything that would alarm her. "Chest or abdomen?"

"Uhh…here. Chest, under the ribs, on the right," he motions. "Like kind of in the back."

She nods, presses two fingers onto his radial artery as he struggles for breath. His pulse is faster than normal — even though he regularly has his organs exposed to the world, Henry is still a former pro athlete who runs marathons as a hobby; his pulse usually barely goes about 50. It's at least 80 now. "It'll be okay," she breathes, more to herself than to him, and a look exchanges between them.

"Mom, Cristina wants to talk to you," Hannah passes her the cell phone.

"Okay, so what I could make out of your teenager's blubbering is that Henry's coughing up blood?" Cristina asks.

She nods even though she can't see her. "Yeah. We're waiting for an ambulance. Meet us at Seattle Grace? He's got some pain on the right side of his chest and — Hannah, go get my kit from your dad's office, please — and his pulse is fast but thready, Cristina."

"I'll be there in five," Cristina promises. "I'll tell Bailey and we'll meet you." Bailey has been Henry's surgeon since Richard retired, but this feels like it's in the lungs, hence calling Cristina. Cristina is an arrogant surgeon — she begged Teddy to keep being chief because she couldn't be bothered with teaching and paperwork — but is undoubtedly, unequivocally the best cardiac surgeon in the US. She is well beyond tumor extractions, flies to Tokyo and Mexico to perform surgeries that get her in newspapers and medical journals, but she is the only person Teddy trusts to touch Henry's lungs, and Teddy knows Cristina knows and respects this.

"Ambulance is coming in a few, Mom," Max says, hanging up the phone. "I'm going to call Sam."

"No, don't," she says, "No use worrying him until we know what's going on." Henry starts coughing again, so she reaches out again with the towel. The blood splatters onto her silk sweater, and Max flinches at the sight. She realizes her kids have never seen this terrible side to Henry's illness: Although he's had 26 surgeries since Hannah was born, his tumors and flares are always caught by scans; any pain or discomfort or sickness caused by the drugs and radiation are kept hidden from the children; surgeries, when necessary, are scheduled and during the daytime. All that aside, he's been on a pretty effective drug and gene-therapy regimen for the last several years and hasn't had surgery in 9 months, a personal best. He's collapsed or coughed blood seven times since Hannah was born, requiring emergency surgery; however, the kids had never been present during those. The disease has always simply been a backdrop for the kids, and now it's their father puking blood all over their kitchen.

They hear the wail of the ambulance coming down the street, and then there's a knock at the door. The paramedics come in, stretcher in tow. She introduces herself (Dr. Teddy Altman, _chief _of cardiothoracic surgery at Seattle Grace), gives an authoritative run-down of the disease and the symptoms and explains in no uncertain terms that he is going to Seattle Grace. She then turns to her teenagers, almost forgotten in the hustle, as the paramedics hook up a mask and a heart rate monitor. "You guys follow in your car, okay, Hannah? You won't be allowed back, so just let the ED nurse know you're there, have her call me, and then sit in the surgical lobby, okay?"

"What's going on Mom?" Hannah asks nervously.

"It's your dad's VHL. There's probably a tumor that snuck up on us that we're going to need to take out, soon. It sounds like it's near his lungs. That's why I called Cristina." Hannah is pale and shaky, so she wraps her in a hug. "I promise it will be alright. But I have to go with your dad right now and take care of him, okay?"

"Banana," Henry calls, lifting up the mask. "It'll be fine. By morning, it'll be all over. Drive your brother and meet us at the hospital." He reaches out and squeezes her hand. "I'll be fine."

She follows the stretcher out to the ambulance blindly, sits down on the bench and leans back before taking a deep breath. Henry's coughing is getting much worse, and she tries to help him cough into the tub and help him breath and not freak out. She can focus on that. Truthfully, though, it's been years since this happened, and she is just as scared as Hannah right now.

"Hey," he says between coughs, and she can see fear in his eyes too, "It'll be alright."

She tries to smile, but the motion only brings tears to her eyes. "Yeah, yeah," she tries. "Miranda and Cristina will meet us there." She realizes that she's shaking, actually, physically shaking, and tries to clench her hands to calm her nerves.

"The nursing staff better hope that there's an awesome trauma right behind me," he teases, "Or else you're going to give them _hell_ tonight." He tries to grin, but starts coughing again. The coughs are sounding deeper, more pernicious. She prays.

Cristina and Bailey are waiting for the ambulance, already suited up. The paramedic tries to deliver stats but she steamrolls over him, and Bailey quickly directs them to a private room in the ED. She gets an eerie sense of déjà vu as they work, work, work, and all he does is cough up blood. Eventually the coughing-up-blood does stop, at which point Cristina and Bailey agree to take him up for a CT. She's about to follow when he says, "Go check on the kids, please."

Cristina nods. "We'll page you when scans are up."

"Contrast and non-contrast," she demands.

"Of course. Now go," Bailey orders.

She checks her phone, but the kids haven't texted her, nor has the ED paged her. She wanders around for a little, checks the vending-machine area, when suddenly they come rushing in the front doors.

"What took you so long?" she demands, hugging them both.

"We — the kitchen," Hannah says. "We had to clean up the kitchen. There was so much blood, all over the kitchen."

Right. Hannah and Max would do that. "Of course. Thank you," she says, putting her hand on Hannah's shoulder.

"Where's Dad?" Max asks.

"He's going to a CT now. They have to see what's causing all this bleeding. They just took him up; I'm going to meet Cristina up there to take a look at his scans," she says.

"We're coming too," Max says resolutely.

She's a little taken aback. "No, honey," she says kindly. "This — this is doctor stuff. The hospital doesn't let family back there."

"They're letting you back," Hannah says.

"Only as a professional courtesy."

"We can come as a professional courtesy," Max says. His voice is stubborn, but her cocky 15-year-old baby boy just looks downright scared.

She flails. Internally, she flails. Somehow, she has never had to deal with both freaking-out children and a potentially dying husband at the same time. She's scared and she knows she's still shaking and kind of crying and that's only freaking them out more, and she needs to be dealing with Henry, not with her kids, right now, but her kids have _never_ seen this happen and she needs to calm them down and reassure them, stat.

"Listen to me," she says, trying to quell her nerves. "I know it's hard for you to hear, and you're scared, but you guys going up to CT will just slow everything down. Your dad will have some time between the CT and surgery and if he's doing okay and can talk to you guys, you'll see him then, okay? It should be in about 30 or 45 minutes. You can see him in 30 minutes. Do you want to go to the attendings' lounge?"

The two look at each other and nod. They've spent plenty of time there waiting for her to finish surgery, so it won't be unusual, plus it's more private. She puts her arm around Hannah — Max pulled away — as she leads them upstairs.

"You know, Dad's surgeries have always been scheduled," Hannah muses. "Like, we would come in after school and do our homework while he recovered and it never made sense that you would flit in and out and yell at Dr. Bailey and be super-stressed out the whole time. Now it does."

She shrugs. "When your dad and I met the VHL was a lot less under control. It was why we got married, you know — he needed a surgery he couldn't afford. The gene therapies hadn't really been discovered. He had a few … close calls. One a lot like this, actually."

Hannah laughs. "I've always kind of thought you guys made up the insurance story."

"Who would make up such a stupid story?" Max interjects.

Hannah shrugs. "That's just it — it's so stupid. I figured they made it up to cover up something else. Because the insurance fraud makes more sense than, you know, something like love at first sight. But I always figured it _was _love at first sight and you just made this up so you wouldn't feel ridiculous, since you were old when you met and love at first sight is really stupid when you're not, like, 15 or in a Bronte novel."

She stares at Hannah incredulously. "So you think we _made up _a story about me doing something _very_ ethically suspect in order to make us seem _less_ ridiculous?"

Hannah holds up her hands as if to say _What do you want me to say_? "I mean, yeah, love at first sight is ridiculous, but so is 'I married him because he needed live-saving surgery and didn't have insurance and we met in an elevator the day before.' In fact, yours is more ridiculous, but I figured you guys were, like, ashamed of looking childish, since you were … you know … older."

She laughs. "No. We really did meet the day before, he really did need insurance, we really did get married because of that. He'd asked his ex-girlfriend to marry him but she said no so I volunteered. We didn't start dating for six months. I used to go over to his apartment and bring him leftovers from all my bad dates and complain. He confessed his feelings for me the first time hopped up on morphine in an MRI in front of Cristina and the old chief." She starts laughing so hard she starts crying, because what if she loses him tonight? She can't handle that. "We moved in together nine months after we got married. I promise. Hell, we didn't buy rings until our fifth anniversary."

Hannah stares at her. "So you really just married him like that? How did you know he would turn out to be, you know, _Dad_, and not just some skeevy creep who was going to take your money and run?"

"It's not like I had actual money to take, Hannah Cassandra, don't be dramatic," she says. She doesn't have time for this, but it's easier than going to the CT. "It just happened." They're at the lounge, so she reluctantly steps back. "I'm going to go check on them and call your brother. I'll come get you when you can see him."

On her way back to CT, though, it finally hits her. She gives herself five minutes before finally collecting herself and walking up to CT. The techs are still setting him up, so she goes in to do a final check.

"How are you feeling?" she asks, reaching for his hand.

He can't sit up, which is always a position that he hates — he feels trapped, lying down — but he nods. "Better," he says. "It's been so long since something like this happened, though."

"Yeah," she says, tracing the hairs on his upper arms mindlessly. "The kids are kind of freaked out. I'm kind of freaked out," she admits.

"No breaking into the OR this time, okay?" he teases. "It makes me look like a wuss in front of all the other patients, having my wife constantly thinking I can't pull through."

"Yeah, how do you think I look to all the interns, bursting in there?" she teases. "Richard Webber still gives me crap about how I handled your first so-now-we're-officially-married surgery."

"The speech was cute," he says. "Endearing even."

She laughs, then sighs. "You're going to be fine," she says forcefully.

"I know," he replies. Then, "how are the kids? I … Hannah …"

"They're both pretty shaken up. They tried to tell me they should come to the CT," she says. "I told them they can see you after, before we take you up to surgery."

"Sounds good," he sighs.

There's a rap on the window, Cristina signaling they're ready to go. She kisses him lightly, warns him to stay still, then joins them on the other side of the glass.

"How're the kids doing?" Bailey asks.

"Scared," she answers. "I put them up in the resident's lounge. I need to call Sam; he's in Vancouver for the student-council retreat." She checks her phone, finds a flight leaving Vancouver in 90 minutes, and books it. Then she dials Sam, stepping out of the room as the machines work their magic.

"Mom?" he says, slightly disoriented. After all, it is almost midnight, and he's in Vancouver, having fun with his friends.

"Hey, honey," she exhales. "How's Vancouver? Did you guys get there safely?"

"Yeah, we just got back from dinner and getting ready for bed … Sessions tomorrow. Everything okay?" Of course Sam would go straight for that. Max is their brash, bold, in-charge son. Sam is quieter, sweet and thoughtful and intuitive.

She inhales. "It's your dad, honey. We're not quite sure what's going on, but when Hannah and Max and I came home he was coughing up blood. We're at Seattle Grace now. He'll probably have to go into surgery pretty soon."

"Surgery?" he sounds mystified. "For what?"

"The Von Hippel-Lindau Disease, honey," she says. "The reason he's, you know, always having surgery."

"Yeah, but … coughing blood?"

"Yeah," she sighs. "It's … I don't know anything yet, I'm about to go look at his scans, but it sounds like Cristina will be taking him into surgery tonight."

"Is he … going to be okay?""

She pauses. "We don't know yet, honey. There's a flight out of Vancouver in 90 minutes. I booked you on it."

"So he's not going to be okay?" Sam's voice pitches up.

"I don't know, honey. Most likely, yeah, he'll be fine. But I also thought you might feel better with the option."

He doesn't hesitate. "I'll take the flight," he says. "Can I just take a cab?"

"I'll email you the flight confirmation and call Mrs. What's-her-face."

"Wasserfeint."

"Whatever," she says. "Call when you're at the airport."

"Teddy? In here. Scans are up," Bailey tucks her head around the corner.

"One sec — gotta make a call," she says, quickly dialing the prudish 50-year-old student-council adviser.

"No, come in here."

She quickly leaves a message on Mrs. Wasserfeint's cell — it'll have to do for now — and then goes in as the scans roll in. She starts texting Arizona to get her to pick up Sam from the airport.

"Oh my god," she says, staring at the images. She touches the clear screen twice quickly to get a zoom, but the image doesn't need any enhancement: There's a tumor webbed dangerously between his spine and right lung, threading near his pulmonary artery.

"Oh damn," says Cristina, smacking Enter to change the images to another, also not-good angle on the tumor.

"That can't be right," she breathes. "He hasn't had any pain — we had a scan two months ago. He's been _fine_."

"It's not too big," Cristina points out, and really, it's slightly smaller than a golf ball. "Depending on how far it's grown into blood vessels — and really it shouldn't be too attached if it didn't show up on a scan two months ago — it's a pretty straightforward resection. The major complication right now is its closeness to the spine."

"Page Grey, she's on call tonight. She needs to look at this," Bailey says grimly, and Cristina complies. "Let's get him out of the machine, then you and the kids can see him and the Wonder Twins will figure out how to get that damn thing out." Her voice is grim, and Teddy stares worriedly. Miranda turns to go grab Henry, but then notices that Teddy isn't behind her. "You coming?"

She nods, rocking her body, trying to will herself the courage to do this. She presses her lips together, stares at the speckling in the ceiling. "Yeah — just, give me a minute?"

"Teddy," Miranda says compassionately, "Look, the scans look scary. But Henry's had, what, 60 surgeries?"

"Sixty-six," she corrects. She almost feels nauseous, and is pretty sure that she's close to a panic attack too.

"Right. So that's 66 surgeries that he has pulled through. And he'll make it out of this one. It's tough but it's not inoperable, and he's had worse tumors. They'll get it. They will. And he'll be fine and you two can go back to raising all-American blonde children and making out in hospital beds when you think nobody is looking."

"Max has brown hair," she points out, not feeling any better. "And I don't know if I'd count Sam as blonde either, really." It's more of a sandy color.

"Whatever, Teddy," Cristina says. "We'll get this. It's me, it's Mere, it's Bailey. We've got this."

Still, they give her a few minutes to collect herself, before Cristina goes to find Meredith and she and Miranda go get him out. "What's the word?" he says, sitting up and reaching for the breathing mask again.

"There's a mass between your lungs and spine," Miranda says, as Teddy tries to focus on simple things, like breathing. "Due to the placement Cristina's gone to consult with Meredith. We're going to get you into a room and probably into surgery within the hour."

He stares at her. "Ted, that doesn't sound too bad," he says. "So why do you look like … well, how you look."

"Sorry," she says, trying to shake the demons out of her head. "Sorry. I'm just a little …" She swallows. "Sorry. The placement, the coughing blood, the kids, I'm just a little freaked out right now."

"Is there something you're not telling me, Miranda?" he asks evenly.

"The placement's pretty precarious — the girls aren't going to know what they're dealing with until they're inside really," Miranda says honestly. "It's not just a cut-and-dry thing. But right now she's just being more heart than head. You gave her a scare there, mister."

Teddy smiles tightly. "Come on. Let's get you in a room and then get the kids. Sam's on a flight back from Vancouver and I want to see what Meredith and Cristina's plan is." She's positively itching for a surgery of her own at this point, but knows that won't happen. She's never had to deal with the kids and the VHL at the same time, and she doesn't like it. "You're going to be fine."

Hannah and Max are grateful but anxious to see their father. His O2 levels are closer to normal, so he doesn't really need the mask, and other than looking a little wan and holding a tub, he seems alright, which throws both of them. Hannah sits on the foot of his bed, the way she used to do when she was a kid, and crosses her ankles to tuck her knees under her chin, making her lanky frame as small as possible. Her hair is thick and unkempt and curtains her face. Max leans against the wall, far away, his long, strong legs stretching in front of him. Hannah, who is a junior in high school, has been thinking about medicine for a while now, so she at least is asking timid questions, like "Does it hurt?" Max is just staring. Eventually Henry starts asking normal questions, like, "So did you finally decide which boy to go to prom with?" Hannah, her father's daughter and therefore completely charming, had received three invitations.  
>"Yes," says Hannah, beaming, her mind temporarily distracted. "Andrew Towson."<p>

"Andrew? Ahhhhhh," Henry says, mimicking the sounds of an adoring crowd. Teddy thinks for a second why that is familiar, then bursts into full-on, belly-grabbing laughter. It's been a long day. Then she thinks of the kids' reactions earlier in the evening, and laughs even harder.

"The hell?" Max asks.

Wiping the tears from her eyes — it's been a long day — she says, "Henry, you will not believe what Hannah told me this evening. Apparently, she thinks we made up the whole we-met-and-got-married-because-of-insurance story. She thinks it's too ridiculous to be true."

"So, you think we made it up? What would it be in place of?"

"I don't know!" Hannah throws her arms up. "But it sounded so dumb."

"Literally," Max chimes in, "it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Ever."

"I kinda thought it was old-fashioned and romantic," Henry counters. "Much better than meeting this Andrew — ahhhhhhh — at school and going to prom with him."

"Why do you keep making that obnoxious noise?" Hannah asks, exasperated.

"Because after we got married but before we got together, I was dating a guy named Andrew, who asked me to move to Germany with him. Your father _hated_ him, of course, so he once made that noise after his name to be annoying."

"Dr. Andrew Perkins, rock star. Ahhhhhhh," Henry teases, lowering his voice to make it sound more dramatic.

"But then you stayed here and stayed with Dad."

"I finally came to my senses," she smiles at him. "Your dad can be pretty persuasive. Also, annoying." She wonders what happened to Dr. Andrew Perkins, rock star. She hopes he's happy somewhere.

Hannah stares at her father, worried. "You cannot do that on prom night."

Max snickers in the corner. "This is the lamest family, ever."

Meredith and Cristina come in then, both looking a little nervous. A cardio resident, Ty Wheatley, accompanies them but stands hesitantly in the corner. The laughter dies down, and Teddy quickly reaches for her wallet. "Why don't you two go check what's in the cafeteria? We never ate our pizza tonight."

"No way, we're staying," Max says.

"Guys, please," Teddy starts.

"When will you stop acting like you're the only person affected by this?" Hannah snaps. "Let us stay."

She deflates. The disease has, in many ways, literal and not, been the foundation of their marriage. It's something that they worry about and make decisions about, together, without anyone else. And they've spent the last 17 years not worrying their children about it. But now the kids are nearly grown, and they just want to know things. She looks at Henry, and he nods imperceptibly. "Okay," she relents. "But let them talk, okay?"

Meredith and Cristina do their freaky-twin-thing, and Cristina is elected to go first. "Okay, so what we're dealing with is a one and a half inch tumor located between your right lung and your spine. The placement is what makes it pretty tricky, so Meredith's been called in to handle the resection from the spine so there isn't any nerve damage. We took some blood samples when you were first admitted and, while your white count is a little high, there's no evidence of any other tumors on your scans so we're confident it's benign. Given the location we want to get a few more scans so we can see how embedded the tumor is in the spine and blood vessels before we go in, but we should start the surgery in the next hour or so."

"So he could be paralyzed?" Hannah demands.

"Hannah," Teddy sighs. "What did I say?"

"It's spinal surgery, which is always a risk," Cristina says. "But given that your father is on a very strict tumor-suppressant regimen and a scan a few months ago showed no tumors, it's unlikely that this is deeply embedded, which means that the chances of a complication like that are pretty minimal." Or it means that it's a nasty and fast-growing tumor, but they don't say that. "Also, most cases of paralysis due to operations are due to surgical error, not a result of the condition."

"And I don't make those," Meredith interjects, with her quirky little half-smile.

"We'll be using micro-surgical techniques, so recovery time should be one-and-a-half weeks to two."

"Why was he coughing up blood?" Max asks.

Cristina looks to Teddy, and Teddy nods, giving her permission to answer. "Tumors grow off organs, Max, they don't just grow in empty space and become a problem when they bump something. The tumor originated in the lungs. The blood means it grew too large and ruptured blood vessels, which filled the lungs. When there's blood in the lungs the body's automatic reaction is to cough it up. We cleared the lungs and did a chest X-ray in the ED, but we could figure that out without the tests."

She quizzes Cristina on the techniques and blades she will use, but her former mentee is a great surgeon now, even if Teddy isn't sure her lessons in humility ever stuck. She is still massively worried about the surgery: It isn't a complicated procedure, but she knows that it is entirely dependent on tumor placement and growth. Patients can still die during simple procedures, or Meredith and Cristina can get in there and realize that the placement is too much of a problem. Just because it's not an edge-of-your-seat, groundbreaking, marathon surgery doesn't mean it's 'safe.'

Sam arrives shortly after his father gets back, escorted in by Arizona, who announces she'll be staying, too, and drops her bag into a corner before wandering off to check in at something at the nurses's station. Not for the first time, Teddy is incredibly grateful Arizona appointed herself Teddy's best friend when they met. Sam looks around wildly, and she hugs him tightly. "Is he okay? Where is he?"

"He's getting a scan right now, he'll be back, then they'll take him into surgery."

"What the hell happened? Sorry," he says, for the swearing. She hates when they swear.

"There's a tumor between his lungs and spinal column; Meredith and Cristina are going to operate."

"How did he get a _tumor_?"

She stares at him. "Sam, you realize that's _why_ your dad gets surgeries every few months, right? We don't just open him up for fun."

"Apparently, that insurance story is real," Hannah chimes in from the corner, where she and Max are finally eating dinner, sub sandwiches from the cafeteria.

"Yeah, yeah, VHL, test-tube babies —"

"Not me!" Hannah sings-songs.

"_Whatever_, Han, but he's never coughed up blood before."

"He has, it's just been a while. Sometimes complications happen," is all Teddy can come up with. "We've done a good job of managing it, most of the time. This snuck up on us."

Henry's wheeled back in, and Sam hugs him gratefully. Meredith and Cristina follow, announcing that the surgery's going to start in 20. Cristina tilts her head to signal that Teddy needs to follow her out, so she does.

"What's up?"

"We did a highlight test, and it looks like the lines to the spinal cord are pretty clear. It's going to be tough in the lungs though. Some of the lung will have probably disintegrated due to the growth. The tumor appears to have flattened against the walls."

"So isolation won't work."

"No. I'm going to use the laser to scrape it off. It's riskier but I've done it dozens of times before and it's always been successful."

"Do you think you're going to need to remove a portion of the lungs?" she asks bluntly. She's suspected that since she saw the scans.

"I might," Cristina admits. "If the tumor originated on the inner wall and penetrated the membrane, then yes. I'm worried about its interactions with the pulmonary artery as well. If we can, I'll remove a portion, but we'll take cells to harvest for a transplant in about a month. With that surgery, his lungs should be at about 95 percent of their current capacity. I'll send someone out to update you every 20 minutes or so."

"No, don't do that, unless it's major. The kids will be there. Text me."

"Sounds good. He'll be fine, Teddy."

She shrugs because she's still not sure. She asks a half-dozen more questions to make sure the surgery is going to go the exactly way she would do it, then says, "Alright. Thank you. And Cristina?"

"Mmmm?"

"Thank you. The way you answered their questions … thank you."

"You have smart kids, boss," Cristina says. "You two did good."

"Clear out, guys," Teddy says, walking back in.

"Seriously, Mom?"

"No, go now, Hannah, this isn't up for debate."

"You two are gross," Max says, his minds jumping to erroneous conclusions, but his brother and sister follow him out.

"What's up?" Henry asks. He knows it's not some kissy-face moment before surgery. They're partners. He can read her.

She sighs. "So the scan shows you've got good lines around the spinal cord but it's definitely an outgrowth from your lungs, so Cristina's going to scrape it off."

"Which is not how they normally do it."

"Nope," she sighs. "It's just a little different … Statistically, nothing too complicated."

"Quit talking statistics. This surgery has you more freaked out than I've ever seen you, and I've seen you pretty freaked out. You're freaking me out. What is it? Tell me."

She sighs. She can't freak him out before surgery; doesn't want to talk about what could happen to his lung. "I don't know. I guess I kind of tricked myself into thinking it was completely under control."

"One surgery a year is still pretty good," he points out.

"Yeah, I know," she says. "We're lucky." She hesitates for a moment, but crawls in beside him. They haven't done this in a while, but right now it's the only thing she can think of that might stop a full-on panic attack in front of her kids. It's mildly dangerous for her, considering he's still coughing up blood on the regular, but she'll brave it. "I got used to you not being in surgery, or the surgeries being scheduled, and me being able to be working instead of being the mom and wife. And we've never … the kids really had no idea what the VHL really means."

"That's a good thing. We tried to keep it low-key for them so they wouldn't freak out. We did pretty good with them."

"I know, I know. I just … I still. Every time. I still don't get how you get to be calm during all of this." She lets out a shaky breath as a few tears leak out of her eyes. The emotion of the night is beginning to get to her, and she really just has to keep it together for a few more minutes.

"It's just like sleeping for me," he says. "Listen. I promised when we had kids I wouldn't die and leave you with a pack of wild teenagers by yourself, and I'm keeping that promise. I'll be fine." He links his hand loosely with hers.

"I know. I know you will," she leans up for a kiss. "Besides, it's baseball season. Even if you didn't love me, you haven't seen the Sox play this year yet."

"It's going to be their year," he jokes. She twists her engagement around her finger. He starts laughing and she looks up at him. "Sorry," he says. "I just — what the hell were they thinking about us making up the story of how we met?"

She laughs too. "I don't know. Hannah thought we were embarrassed about how we actually met and we made it up."

"What did she think was more ridiculous?"

"Love at first sight. Because we were, 'you know, like old.'" She mimics her daughter, and Henry laughs so hard she's worried he's going to start coughing up blood again. She rests beside him, content.

"For what it's worth, I think our story's a lot more romantic than love at first sight," he offers.

"Hannah'll be jealous one day," she agrees.

A nurse knocks on the door then, and says, "It's time to take Mr. Burton up for pre-op, Dr. Altman."

"Of course," she says, rising. Two nurses come in, ready his bed for transport. "I'll walk with you to the elevator."

"No breaking into the surgery. Make Owen give you an appendectomy if you have to," he says.

"I need to stay with the kids," she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "I'll have Arizona. I'll be okay." She looks at the nurses and takes a deep, helpless breath. "He has a much higher pain tolerance than most people, and a much lower tolerance for the pain meds. Dose him slowly in post-op or he'll be stoned for the next three days. And have the anesthesiologist watch him like a hawk — the tumor suppressors make him easily woken so he's going to need higher doses of anesthesia."

"Teddy," he cuts in. "Miranda and Cristina know these things."

She picks some imaginary dust off the shoulder of his gown. "I know," she leans over, kisses him. "I'll see you in post-op."

"Get some sleep, okay?" he says, as they pause by the elevator. "I mean it. Find an empty on-call room and crash."

She nods. "I love you. I'll see you tomorrow," and the elevator takes them up.

She stares at the closed elevator doors for several moments, then slowly slides down the wall to sit, gripping her ankles. She doesn't have a good feeling about this surgery. The tumor grew too fast, she authorized Cristina to remove his lung, it's close to the spine, it is possibly close to the pulmonary artery. She doesn't know what she will do, if this surgery goes wrong, when a surgery goes wrong. She doesn't know where the kids are — probably with Arizona. But eventually Arizona finds her there. Shaking her head, she sits down next to Teddy, handing her a cup of coffee.

"Thanks," she says. "Where are the kids?"

"Sleeping in the attendings' lounge. They kind of crashed."

She takes a sip of the coffee and immediately spits it out. "Is this decaf?"  
>Arizona nods and shrugs. "It's two in the morning. I was hoping the placebo effect would kick in. You need sleep too, Teddy."<p>

She shakes her head. "I can't sleep while he's in surgery. I never have been able to. You should sleep, though."

"What if you need something?" Arizona points out.

She smiles, gratefully, then goes back to mindlessly pulling a thread out of the hem of her sweater. Her phone beeps and she checks the text from Miranda: _Started cutting. BP and heart rate steady_. "You know, this is the first surgery I haven't double-scheduled over since Hannah was in first grade. He'd collapsed at work, tumor near the heart. He was still working at the hospital at the time. Cristina cut it out. And even then I was in surgery when he collapsed and didn't get out for another hour," she shivers. "I hate this. I hate having to think about this. I hate that he has to go through all this. I hate that he has to go through this with a wife who can't even sit in the waiting room, and he has to be the strong one as I freak out."

"Oh, cut the crap. You handle his disease for him every day, and he knows it. You found the treatments, the specialists, flew with him to Minnesota and New York to get him on those trials, to get the meds that have kept him out of surgery most of the time. He doesn't care that you can't sit through a surgery in a waiting room once every six months. I think he finds it flattering, even."

"Flattering?" she scoffs.

"Yes, you loon. That you freak out so much that you break hospital protocol and can't sit still and have to cut up someone else's heart so you don't pace a hole in the floor. He finds it hot that you love him so much. This isn't new."  
>She pauses. "I told Cristina it was okay to cut out his lung if she has to. If it started inside his lung and ate the lining she's going to have to cut out part of his lung. And I told her that was absolutely okay, that she should do that, destroy one of his vital organs. He'll need to have his lung tissue harvested and regrown, and I gave her the okay without asking him."<p>

"Well, it wouldn't've killed you to run that one by him. But he trusts you. He's always trusted you. Remember right after you got married when Richard wanted to do that surgery, and he wouldn't let Richard do his job until he ran the surgery by you? He's always trusted you Teddy. You're the one who made it so he doesn't have to have surgeries every two months. Don't start freaking out now."

She shakes her head. Arizona's tone is very matter-of-fact and gentle, but she doesn't focus on that; Arizona isn't doing it, but her words remind Teddy of what people who don't know her and Henry sometimes imply — that she is his _savior_. She hates that assumption. He's done more for her than she could ever do for him. "There are huge risks to this surgery. Paralysis, loss of lung, the tumor may have already destroyed his pulmonary artery. And I just don't have a very good feeling about it." She looks at her phone, a text from Miranda. _Grey pleased with lines around spine_. "Come on," she stands. "Let's at least go make sure my kids don't wake up."

They find the children, flopped over furniture, passed out. She leaves Arizona quietly with them, then cannot help but go and observe his surgery. She slips into the gallery. Below, Meredith and Cristina and Miranda are working feverishly but efficiently. Teddy leans against the glass, and hopes. It's all she can do.


	6. 2039

So, I found this on my hard drive from five years ago, nearly complete (minus the last paragraph) and decided to toss it up. By doing so, I completely violate the terms of the "five things" meme, and also revisit a fandom I left four years ago. But this was my alternate fifth piece. If anyone else out there still cares about TeddyxHenry, hope this provides a smile on a sunny Sunday.

* * *

><p><em>2039<em>

Teddy has always known that Henry was going to die before her. He is older, male, and regularly has his organs exposed to the world. VHL isn't terminal, as he reminded her many, many times over the course of their life together, but it does have a high risk of attendant fatal complications. Unless she gets in a freak accident or gets an aneurysm, she has known, since the day she fell in love with him, that she would be the one to bury a spouse. It is statistically inevitable.

This is when he dies. He is 71 years old. They have been together 30 years. He saw Hannah graduate from med school. He got to go to Max's White Coat Ceremony. He visited Sam in Berlin, where he is working as a bioengineer for a pharmaceutical company. They have taken twenty-four vacations together, and remodeled the kitchen three times. He is three years retired, after having spent fifteen years as the executive director of the Washington-Alaska branch of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He gave wishes to 12,321 sick kids.

She is 67 years old. She performed her last high-stakes procedure five years ago. She does research now, and teaches out of the University of Washington. She loves teaching. Their house on Mercer Island has an enormous garden, which she tends, laughing at herself a little the entire time. She _gardens_, for crying out loud. She sees Hannah, who came back to Seattle for her residency, several times per week and talks to Max, who is in Philadelphia and constantly freaking out about which surgical specialty to choose, at least daily. She tries to call Sam every day, but he is notoriously bad at communication, and the distance only makes it worse. He worries about her, though.

They are happy. They spend their whole days together, and she thinks that, given how otherwise healthy he is, how healthy she is, they may have twenty more years of this. They could make it to fifty. But less than a month after he gives Hannah away at her wedding, a routine scan shows several tumors peppering his remaining kidney and pancreas. She's used to that. He gets tumors all the time these days. But during surgery Dr. Parness (the protégé of Cristina Yang's protégé, which should give one an idea of how absolutely young she is) realizes they are malignant, and she cannot get all of them without taking out his renal artery. She closes him up and lets them know that it's chemo first.

This time, though, feels different. Treatment is full-time, and he's just … he's tired. He fights because he is Henry, and so of course he fights. But it takes a lot out of him, and it keeps spreading — instead of the scans showing diminished tumor growth as they inevitably beat it back, they keep multiplying. Kidneys, pancreas, gone. Lungs, stomach, next. Liver, bones, consumed like candy. It's full-blown, stage IV, metastasized kidney cancer, in a 71-year-old who already only has one kidney. She doesn't need the medical degree (or two kids in the stages of medical training, which means they think they know everything) to tell her that it's Very Bad. His condition is, finally and fatefully, terminal.

Like most conversations over the course of their relationship, they are at the hospital when they finally have The Talk. Dr. Parness, who is mildly terrified of messing things up (she's still terrified of Cristina), is explaining the latest procedure she recommends trying, a bone removal.

"What are the risks?" Henry asks again, though she knows he knows them. He didn't ever go to medical school, but years of being a patient and being married to her has made him fluent. He doesn't need the doctor to explain anything to him.

"Well, we'll be removing a good portion of your hip, but we'll be using a robot, so the risks of infections or complications from the surgery itself are minimal," she says earnestly.

"But most of my hip will be gone. I could be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. It'll be like some 1950s horror movie: The Boneless Man," he says. He mimics a zombie walk in bed, noodly arms floating like they were dismembered in front of his body.

"Henry," she groans. He was being cutting, not funny, but Dr. Parness doesn't know that, so the young doctor tries laughing.

"It will limit your mobility, but in terms of risks go, it's not the riskiest surgery you've had. And you do have an incredibly strong support system at home," she nods at Teddy, "which will make the transition more livable."

"But this won't be the last surgery. And it'll still be terminal, anyways."

"Well, yes," she admits. "But this is where most of the growth seems to be right now, so if we get it, then there's a chance we could control the cancer with chemo and radiation for the next several weeks or months."

Weeks or months. She hates that.

Henry looks at the young, young doctor, and then says, tiredly, "Can I have a minute to talk to my wife about this, please?"

"Of course," Dr. Parness says, and quickly nods and walks out.

They're quiet for a minute. "What do you think?" he finally asks.

She shrugs. "It's a good surgery. Dr. Parness is pretty good. She's not me, but hey," she tries a joke.

"It's hard to beat one Theodora Altman," he says. "I'm just … I'm not sold that it'll work. And it's pretty drastic. They're removing bones."

"They've run the tests. The metastasizing cells are emanating from your hip now. If they get this, they will slow it for the next several weeks, hopefully. It's not a risky procedure."

"But it's not going to work long-term," he says, gently, and she's not sure what he's getting at.

"Henry, but it's not risky, and coming out of it you'll be okay. Not great, and you might be in a wheelchair, yes, but this will give you extra weeks, months," she is getting a little hysterical. "When it's being in a chair versus living an extra six months, I'm not sure what the holdup is. If you were my patient I'd recommend this!"

"I'm not your patient, I'm your husband," he says, his voice still that patient tone. He's always one step ahead of her on the VHL, holding her hand. She's never gotten used to it. She's a doctor and she's never quite gotten a handle on this disease.

"Exactly, which is why I _really_ want you to get the damn surgery!"

"It's not about this surgery, Ted," he says.

"Then what is it _about_, Henry," she says, sitting on his bed and taking his hand. Pleading with him. "Tell me what it's about, then!"

"Teddy, whether or not I get this surgery — the fact is, this time, you and I both know it's probably my time," he says, putting a hand on her cheek. "And let's face it, that's something we have to talk about."

"I don't want to talk about it," she says petulantly. Because she doesn't.

"I know. I don't either," he says. "But for me — this'll be easy. I've been getting ready for it since before I met you," he reminds her. "For you and for Hannah, for Max and Sam — you're the people it's going to be hardest for. And we need to talk about that."

She's terrified of losing him. _Terrified_. She's lost hundreds of patients, dozens of friends in Iraq. Those were nothing. She lost Cassandra in the Twin Towers, and she's pretty sure that won't even be comparable. Henry — being married to Henry, raising children with Henry, taking care of Henry, having Henry take care of her — has been her entire world for almost 30 years. She's not sure how to redefine herself if (_when_) he dies. He's had at least two — and as many as 18, before they found the drug regimen — surgeries a year since they were married, so she should have been better prepared for this. She's always felt the pull of the borrowed, stolen time. But in the long interludes between surgeries and life-and-death moments, they had carved out a full, magical life. He is her partner, her other and better half.

She tucks herself against his side in the narrow bed, the way they used to whenever he was in the hospital. "If we do this surgery, you'll have a few extra months, probably," she says, breathing noisily. She is not crying. She. Is. Not. Crying. "But then after that they'll probably be other regimens to try, to keep pushing a little more."

"Is that what you want?"

"Henry," she groans. Because it is. It is exactly what she wants. She will always want more time with him.

"Is it? Because if it is I'll do it."

She knows he will. That's the thing. How long he lives from here on out, it's her decision. Would she rather see him keep fighting and give it all he has, let drastic surgeries and chemo destroy his body and put him through unimaginable pain just so she can get a few more weeks with him? And would they even be worthwhile weeks? Or should she _let_ him go, give him the drugs and the surgeries just to manage pain? Would she be okay letting her husband go, would her husband, in the end, be okay with that? Her children? He's already so weak, already in so much pain, already willing to die or live for her.

"The one thing I _don't_ want," he says, "is to die on the table. To go into surgery and just never wake up again."  
>"I won't let that happen," she breathes. "I promise." She takes a deep breath. "This surgery — it'll give us about three months, on the outside, probably. Probably more like one or two, before they need to do something else." She looks at him. "I think — I think that's enough time to say goodbye. Get everything in order. Can I — can I ask you to do this last one? We won't have them remove too much of the bone. And that'll … that'll be it."<p>

He looks at her and nods. Okay.

She's the one who has to call Sam, call Max, talk to Hannah. She needs to prep them all. Once he's resting she starts with Sam, sweet and brilliant Sam. Sam is their creative, intellectual, artistic child, but he's so much more, too: In high school he starred in all the musicals and then also kicked ass at the Science Fair and captained three sports teams. Sam is the one who will listen before yelling.

She knows it's late in Germany but she dials the memorized digits. Sam's sleepy, alarmed voice goes, "H'lo? Mom, is everything alright?"

"Hey, Samuel," she says, struck not for the first time about how drastic a 9-hour time difference really is. "How's it going?"

"Good. Is Dad okay?"

"Yeah, for now," she says, taking a deep breath. "For now."  
>"What's that mean?" he says, his voice much calmer now.<p>

"It means … Your dad and I made some decisions today, Sam. We're going to switch to a more palliative regimen after his surgery tomorrow."

"Palliative," Sam's voice is flat. He might be her only child not training to become a doctor but he's a bioengineer, he designs synthetic hearts and diabetes drugs. He knows the word palliative.

"Yes," she says firmly. "It's not getting any better. Any further drastic treatments are only going to add days or weeks, and at a huge cost to him physically and emotionally. He'd probably go into a coma first, then go, and he'll have a higher risk of dying due to complications. And he … he doesn't want that, Sam, he doesn't. He doesn't want to die on the table, or be so drugged up his last days … his last days that he can't say good-bye to any of us." At that point the tears overwhelm her. Sam lets her cry. "So he's having one more, that should probably give us a few months, and that's going to let us have time to say good-bye," she says. "We'll know more after he has the operation tomorrow."

Sam is quiet. She can tell he's struggling to process it. Sam has always been the introverted child, the one both of them had the most trouble reaching. "What are you thinking?" she begs, finally.

"I'm thinking I should come home soon, then," he says.

"Probably, yes," she says, trying to stay brave. "Maybe you and Max can come home in a few weeks, at the same time. I think he'd like that."

"Yeah," Sam says, and she can tell her baby boy is near tears. "Yeah. Okay. I'm guessing I was your first call? I'll give you an hour or so to call Max and then I'll send him an email. Maybe next weekend ... We'll come home, okay, Mom?"

"Sounds good, baby," she replies.

"How are you doing?"

She shrugs, though she knows he can't see her. "It's hard, Sam. It's hard."

"Don't sit alone during his surgery, okay?" Sam says. "Get Uncle Owen or Aunt Arizona or someone to sit with you."

"Promise," she says, before they say their good-byes and hang up.

Next up is Max. Max was the quarterback on the football team in high school, and that's what he is in all of their lives. He is bright and charming and relentlessly outgoing, and always the ringleader. He was the homecoming king and the one almost kicked out of Lakeside for masterminding the senior prank. That's her Max. He will run a hospital one day.

"Mom!" he says cheerfully as soon as he picks up. "Guess what I saw today? A Fontan procedure. It was probably the _coolest_ thing I have ever seen. Did you ever perform one?"

"About two or three a year, yeah," she replies, focusing on his budding surgical career. He is a third-year med student, currently in observational rotations at Penn, but he knows he wants to be a surgeon.

"Can you show me the handwork next time I'm at home? Because the way this surgeon … I mean, Mom, you and Cristina are absolute rock stars, so if I was impressed by this chick I can't wait to see what you can do, and, also, one of my surgery profs talked about the Yang Method the other day, and I was just sitting there, laughing, because all of you guys have your names on these awesome —"

"Max," she says, cutting in gently before her starry-eyed son can continue boosting his ego through association with his famous not-really-relatives, "Max. I called for a reason."

He instantly deflates. "Is it Dad?"  
>She walks him through everything, quietly. He pushes back, demands why, as a doctor, she's advising a patient to stop a line of treatment, why she's not demanding more, getting more weeks and days. He's arguing, and he's damn good at it. Finally she just says, "This is what he wants, Max."<p>

He can't argue with that. "I should come home, then," he says.

"Sam … Sam thinks you guys should pick a weekend when you can both come out, when he's still doing well," she says. "I think that's a good idea. And then you can all … I think it's a good idea."

"I'll talk to Sam," he promises before hanging up.

Next left is Hannah Banana, the hardest conversation and the one that she has to do in person. Hannah had loved Seattle Grace growing up — she could still remember when both her parents worked there — and had turned down Mass Gen and Johns Hopkins residencies after Columbia Med to come back. Once her dad had gotten sick, she had tried to be more involved in his treatment, but the internship year had been more insane than she had even anticipated; besides, treatment and Henry's illness has forever been something handled by the _two _of them, nobody else. It is a part of their marriage bond, and they prefer it that way. Hannah is both of them, Teddy and Henry, all at once: She is exactly like Teddy, but she is, devotedly and undoubtedly, a daddy's girl. Hannah will be devastated.

She knows her daughter is somewhere in SGMW, and so she texts her and asks her to meet her in the cafeteria. "Hey, Mom," she says, her voice chirpy when she finds her. Hannah is at the glorious golden phase of her life: recently married, loving the internship, everything slotting neatly into its place. There's a glow, and it makes it hard for her to sometimes see anyone else's problems.

"Hey, baby. How's work going? Did I catch you at a bad time?" She schools her face carefully.

"No, no, it's crazy but it's good. I was with Dr. Reyes today," Dr. Reyes specializes in children's oncology. Hannah is much more interested in long-term treatment of patients than cutting, but oncologists do their internships in another field before transferring over, so she was completing a surgical internship before transferring into the oncology residency program. "It's so sad, but fascinating," she replies. "I wanna talk to Aunt Arizona about it. If she thinks peds oncology would be a good fit. I know I was thinking surgical oncology but I think this is better. I keep meaning to call her or ask her out to lunch or something."

"I think you'd be great with them, honey, but it'd be hard."  
>"I know, but there's always going to be something hard about being a doctor, you know? I want the hardness to be worthwhile."<p>

A lump forms in her throat. "I have something pretty hard I need to talk to you about, actually," she admits.

Hannah cries. A lot. Hannah gets out her cell to call the head of oncology, to call Dr. Parness, to call Owen (though he has absolutely zero power now), to call Lexie. She tells Teddy that it's just a pride thing; that Henry is being too proud to possibly be in a chair and that she (Teddy) is too proud to act as her husband's nurse for the rest of his life.

"Hannah," she finally says, gripping her daughter's hands. "I would change bedpans for your father. This is the hardest decision I've ever had to make. This is me, as a wife, making the decision, with my husband. Your dad wants to be able to say good-bye, and he wants to remember things, and he would absolutely keep pushing on with surgeries, if that's what I wanted, but I can't. I can't make him, Hannah, all right? He's my husband; he's the love of my life. I am _not_ okay with this, but … it's what's going to happen, Banana. We can't stop this, this time. It's terminal. You've seen the charts. You know it's terminal. And he needs you to be strong, okay, baby?"

All Hannah can do in response is cry more. Eventually Teddy sends her back to the Pit, though she's pretty sure that's a terrible idea, and tells her to come visit her dad that evening.

Henry finally wakes up around 6 p.m. She's sitting in a chair reading the latest issue of NEJM. "Hey," she says, moving to sit beside him. "I talked to all the kids, and the boys are coming home next weekend. Your surgery is tomorrow at 11 a.m."

He nods. "Are you going home tonight?"  
>She balks. "Of course not, Henry." And so she stays.<p>

Lexie would let her observe the surgery from the gallery, even though she no longer has privileges, but she honestly can't bear it. It will just lead to a buildup of frenetic energy, energy that could only be excised through surgery, and she doesn't do surgery anymore. She forced Hannah to keep working, and knows that Hannah will probably pop in several times, but she has actually opted to sit out in the waiting room. She'd meant to call Arizona for company but had completely forgotten. Lexie, however, had called in reinforcements; barely ten minutes after the surgery began, Owen appeared at the waiting room door. Without speaking, he sat next to her.

She looks at him, her brother, wryly. He speaks first. "You know, I still remember that morning when you called me and asked me to be your witness at your wedding. I thought you were insane."

"You made that pretty clear," she points out. He really had. "I've been to interfaith weddings where the Jewish grandmothers are less judgmental."

"My point," he says gently, wrapping an arm around her, "is that marrying that man is probably the best decision you've ever made. Ever. And even though I was a little … skeptical at the wedding, thank you for inviting me to be your witness." She sinks into his embrace, craving support.

"You were still my best friend, Owen," she says, "I couldn't get married without you. And your judgmental face."

He laughs. "What I still don't get, though," he continues, "is why Henry?"

"What do you mean?"

"You'd seen plenty of patients, in terrible conditions, needing insurance, needing help, and the one that you randomly decide to help out by marrying — turns out to be Henry. And you two click. And you make it work and you have three beautiful children and thirty years together. It just seems ... incredibly lucky, that's all."

She shrugs. She still doesn't know why. "I don't know, it just did. It's one of those things I can't explain, that I had to do. Like you inviting me to come to Seattle. It wasn't planned, but when it came along, I had to do it.'" She smiles. "I don't know why. I was so upset about Cristina and about Arizona and it just happened. Thank God, you know?" Because she can't imagine what other way her life might have gone: Everything from deciding to go to med school on seemed like a step in the path to meeting Henry. Leading her to here. Leading her to this and to now.

"Yeah. I'm very glad you did," he says.

Arizona shows up soon after, and the surgery doesn't take long, anyways; he's awake in three hours. He's a little stoned, but, as she promised him, he did not die on a table. They both go home from the hospital two days later. She knows that it is her last time entering the hospital as the worried wife of a surgical patient. It's much worse than the feeling she had the last time she left as a surgeon.

Over the next few weeks Hannah is an overwhelmingly present daughter, as much as an intern can be. When she can't be there, she sics Josh on them, and it's lucky Henry likes him so much. Their son-in-law eats almost every dinner with them for the next several days. The boys call daily, worried, but their children's puttering just feels like white noise to Teddy and Henry. They are in their last days together, and they know it. She's still hugely uncomfortable with the idea, but their suspended state of being means that their lives move slower. They get up, she helps him get ready, they make breakfast together, sit on the sun-porch, backs resting on opposite ends of the wicker couch, trade books. Sometimes friends visit — people from the hospital, old coworkers and acquaintances from Make-A-Wish, neighbors, people they've collected over the years — but usually only for a few hours, in the afternoon. There's no longer any urgency attached to their lives. They exist in a suspense-less infinity, just him and her. They could have two days or two hundred like this. If he weren't dying, it would be wonderful. His test results show that the cancer was slowed by surgery but still spreading quickly. He doesn't have much time.

The boys fly out on a Friday; she picks up Max from his 2 o'clock flight but asks Hannah grab Sam and his girlfriend Charlotte, as they don't get in until 7. Max meets her at baggage claim lugging two backpacks of med-school texts. She frowns at them disapprovingly. This is probably their last weekend as a family.

"Mom — you did med school," he grumbles, noticing her stare. "I had to study on the plane."

"Fine," she says, putting her arm around him. "But we're probably going to see … well, everyone, this weekend. No shop talk."

"Mom, I'll have Cristina Yang and Derek Shepherd in the same room with me. Can't I at least take advantage?" he teases lightly.

"They changed your diapers," she reminds him.

He laughs, then sobers. "So how's Dad?"

"He's … trying to make the most of it," she says. "But Max, this is going to be hard, okay?"

Her son nods. The last time he looked that scared and innocent, she thinks, was when he was six and fell off the carousel, breaking his leg. They had called Callie Torres, then an ambulance. "He's retained some mobility and prefers to move around with crutches or a cane, but he can't walk for very long stretches, which is tough for him. So he mostly spends his time sitting. We make one good walk around the block in the morning and that's kind of it," she continues. "Otherwise, he's fine — he's himself. But the test results aren't good, and unless something reverses we are talking weeks." She swallows the lump in her throat.

Henry is thrilled the see Max, of course. She helps Henry stand up to hug his son, then sits him back down, gently.

"How are you feeling?" Max asks, then: "Sorry. That was stupid."

Henry laughs. "I get it a lot, actually, it's fine," he says. "I'm tired sometimes but honestly not that bad. Sometimes there's a little pain too, but your mom keeps me pretty hopped up."

"Oh, I do _not,_" she chides on cue, and it's like Old Times.

"Come on, tell me about med school," Henry says. The boys settle in to talk about Max's coursework and intramural kickball team and the girl that he's seeing, Carrie, who is a research assistant in a bio lab and a senior at Penn. Max seems smitten and she has a feeling it's getting serious. Henry makes jokes about him cradle robbing. They put on a baseball game and she futzes around, interjecting sometimes, but mostly just cleaning because it's going to be a full-house kind of weekend. Sam texts when he lands and 40 minutes later, he, Charlotte, Hannah, and Josh burst through the front door.

Henry is in his element in dinner: Surrounded by his family, the center of attention, making jokes, telling an endless supply of embarrassing stories. They've never met Charlotte before, though she's been dating Sam for over a year, and it's clear that Henry enjoys the hell of out her. Her English is tremendous and she makes fun of Sam exactly when he needs his ego deflated. Hannah's been tremulous and nervous for the last several days but having her baby brothers back calms her.

She corners Sam in the kitchen as he's pouring more wine during a couple's Scrabble-Off (Max, of course, is confident he can win without a partner). "She's nice," she says. "I can see why you're … smitten."

"Nobody says smitten, Mom, and if they did, I think it'd be a little past that," he groans, but relents. "I … I wanted her to meet Dad."

Her heart softens, and she grins. "So it's serious?" She's suspected as much for a while. She's mildly jealous of Hannah and Sam, for finding partners so young. She got so many years with Henry, but can only think of how different it might have been if they got 50 years together.

He shrugs. "I think so, yeah. I don't _know_ yet, but I wanted …"

"I know," she says. "Your dad likes her, a lot."

"It's not just rose-colored glasses brought on by death?" his tone his half-amused, but deadly serious.

She shakes her head, her breath caught in her throat. "I've seen … sometimes dozens of people die, each week, Sammy. And I've never seen someone just accept it the way your dad can. He's … In some ways he's been waiting on this to happen since before I even met him. Knowing that it's happening soon doesn't change his outlook at all. His priorities are different than they were when we met but his outlook hasn't changed at all."

"I used to think you guys had the craziest story," Hannah says, her crinkling voice coming from the doorway. "I mean, I think I still do. But now I think it's crazy in a once-in-a-lifetime-romance way."

Teddy laughs at the memory of 17-year-old Hannah announcing she always assumed the story was a ruse. "That's the way your dad always wanted you to see it."

"It was a good story. And there's nothing wrong with a good story," Sam says. The eerie echo of his words — she's sworn she's heard them before, a lifetime ago — give Teddy pause.

"It's a great story," she replies. "The best story I'll ever tell." She loops an arm around each kid's shoulder. "Come on. Let's go make sure Max loses Scrabble, OK?"

Not so many hours later, Henry gets tired, and she helps get him into their bed. She tucks him in, folds the blankets around him multiple times, just to make sure she's got it right. Makes sure he has some water and pain meds on his end table.

"Honey, I'm fine," he says, catching her wrist with his hand. They make eye contact, and she knows that he is. She stops.

She kisses his temple, then crawls into bed beside him. She wraps herself around him gingerly — his hip is still in tremendous pain. He's exhausted, but not quite ready for sleep. They sit, quietly.

"It was great, to have Sam back," he says. "He never comes back these days. And I like Charlotte a lot."

"I did too," she murmurs, into his side.

"He said … He said he might propose, you know," Henry says.

"It's funny, that two of our three kids might get married before they're 30. It took us forever to get it together."

"What are you talking about? We got married twenty-four hours after we met."

"Yeah, but you were 40, and I was … 36? 37? I was old. It took us forever to get there."

"I wouldn't have had it any other way," he says, lightly stroking her shoulder.

"You wouldn't?" she asks, perking her head up.

"What? No. I love us," he says.

"Right, but what if we could have met ten years earlier? Or ten days earlier?" Hell, ten _minutes_ earlier.

"We could have — probably should have — had more years, yes. But if we hadn't met when we did, when I was sick, when you were sad, we wouldn't have gotten married the way we did. We wouldn't have gone through everything we went through to be together. We wouldn't be as strong, we wouldn't have known how much we could love each other. And we wouldn't have gotten those three kids in the bargain. We might have gotten some other kids, but they probably would have sucked."

"Not with our genes," she teases, then sobers. "I want the ten extra years," she admits, and tears break through her eyes. "Or the ten extra days. Or the ten extra minutes."

"Heyyyyy," he draws, hugging her tighter as she really begins to cry. "Theodora Altman, you saved my life. Literally, metaphorically, all of it. I had those thirty years because of you. And you made them … extraordinary. No, I wouldn't change any of that. I wouldn't change that you didn't change your last name. I wouldn't change that we didn't get rings for five years. I wouldn't change that fight we had about med school. I wouldn't change that terrible family vacation to Mexico. I wouldn't change the fear from realizing you got pregnant and the baby might have the disease. You hear me? None of it."

She wipes her eyes, then kisses him gently. "You saved my life too, you know."

"I do, actually," he says. "It's been extraordinary, Teddy. No matter how … how many days I have left, it's been extraordinary."

She pauses. "Are you scared?" All these years, she's always been more fearful than him. More fearful that this surgery will be his last, that a cough is something more, that a scan will come back abnormal. His steady good humor through all of it — without it, she could not have lived with the fear, would have become emotionally gnarled and stunted.

"Just for you," he says. "I know the kids will be alright, but I am worried about you. It's — it's different, because every other time, I was a little cavalier about the odds. I wanted to live, I fought for it, but it was out of my hands. Now … it's not. But I … I know that it's been a long road, and it's been a good road, and that I'm lucky that it lasted this long."

She kisses him long. Hard. "Don't worry about me," she says, the control-freak veneer cracking into freedom. I'll miss you. I'll always love you. Each day will be worth a little yes, and I'll probably be sad for a very long time — but the only reason they'll each be less, is because each of these days has been worth so much."

"You'll be OK?" he checks.

"I'll be OK," she says, and she knows that it is true.

This is how Henry dies: Surrounded by his three beautiful children, his hand in his wife's, in the home they built together, six weeks after their last weekend as a family. He is seventy-one. He was married to Teddy for twenty-nine years, ten months, and five days.

There is a beautiful funeral, arranged largely by Arizona. Sam reads Ecclesiastes and Max reads Dylan Thomas and Hannah, flanked by her brothers for strength, gives a eulogy. Teddy sits in the front pew of the church, Arizona on one side and Owen on the other. The church is filled with flowers from their garden.

When she leaves the church, the thin fall sun shines on her face. There is a reception, back at their house, and Teddy gets in the first car back so she can greet people. Zola Shepherd is driving, and she is appropriately silent. On the ride, she does the math: Statistically, she is going to live another fourteen years. Coupled with the thirty-seven before they married, the balance of her life will have been spent being Not Henry's Wife.

And suddenly she gets it. She gets why Henry didn't care if they met ten years earlier or ten minutes earlier or exactly when they did; why he was always so content to be in the moment, why he didn't stress about the surgeries and the scans and the sutures. Whether or not she spends another twenty years on the earth, alive, being Not Henry's Wife but rather Henry's Widow, she's had the best thing that could happen to her happen, and she's already had the worst thing that could happen to her happen. The rest … is water. They had their time together, clear and perfect and infinitely long and infinitely short, and the length no longer matters. Just that they had it matters.

This is how Teddy Burton dies: She is ninety-one, skin translucent and wrinkled and hair nearly gone and bones sinking into her hospital bed. She spent thirty-seven years alone, then nearly thirty married, and then another thirty-four as the grandmother who gardens. She is surrounded by her three children, three kids-in-law, one former kid-in-law, and seven grandchildren. Five are doctors or in medical school, and three have the middle name Henry. She is tired, so tired, but content. She lived a full life, she loved beyond measure, she loved back beyond measure. She is not scared. She is ready.


End file.
